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Comment by mm4 | Hacker News Reader

if MRI would be sensible enough to read memories and thoughts, how long would you think it would take before there would be a law allowing them to dump your brain at an airport...? The sad part is - the only defense is dying of old age or accident before this miracle of science is developed...

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Black Mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You at T+3:40 . You can find it on google videos search.

We're not at that juncture, and, I wouldn't assume there isn't a way around it. You could still obfuscate information in your brain such that it's hard to decode.

>You could still obfuscate information in your brain such that it's hard to decode.

And that would made you unemployable, subject to arrest, etc.

Political and legal issues don't get solved with technical workarounds (unless they can force the law to change -- which I guess would count as a legal change, not a technical workaround).

Well, I don't think we need to be dogmatic about saying politics is the only solution. I think technology often moves forward when policy fails. But, that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight with everything we have for policy we believe is right.

This is the plot of _The Demolished Man_ (Bester, 1953)

We're very, very distant of such capability, waitbutwhy published an amazing article on the challenge of mapping and interacting with the brain via Brain Machine Interfaces [0]. If we ever achieve that, it will certainly not look like MRI as we know it today.

[0]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part3 (See 'Back to Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces')

An MRI will be never the sensitive, the technology does not have that ability. i.e. the noise is far larger than the signal, so no improvement in technology will overcome that. (It has to read a signal from a single neuron amongst trillions of them.)

It would, at a minimum, require brain surgery and probes. But that's unlikely to be possible without damaging the person.

You have nothing to worry about - ever.

Maybe if they froze, and then took apart a person, atom by atom, and uploaded everything to a simulator.

I'm flying significantly less, you could try that?

That's a workaround.

Besides, flying less from an island is tricky for some.

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