Based on the Jail Coverage Institute, the US has the next incarceration fee per 100,000 folks in its inhabitants than another NATO nation and it’s even greater than the subsequent 5 member states mixed (the UK, Portugal, Canada, France and Belgium).
So what’s the answer? Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist and science communicator from Yemen, claims he’s obtained it in an interview with Wired: construct a digital jail as a substitute. He’s not speaking about stapling a bunch of Meta Quest 3’s to prisoners’ heads for years at a time, but it surely’s additionally not far off from that idea.
Al-Ghaili is proposing a brand new neurological jail system that he calls Cognify. He posted a proposal video of the digital justice system on his Instagram and YouTube channel and it seems downright horrifying.
Right here’s how Cognify works in a theoretical nutshell — As an alternative of locking prisoners up for lengthy intervals of time, prisoners can be subjected to synthetic reminiscences in a digital surroundings. The system creates custom-made AI-generated content material that’s transformed to visible data and delivered to the prisoner’s mind in addition to the elements of their DNA and RNA linked to reminiscence formation to determine a long run reminiscence sample.
At the moment, such expertise doesn’t exist and Cognify is simply a proposal. Nonetheless, Al-Ghaili claims that experiments performed on animals show this course of might work on people sooner or later sooner or later. As an illustration, a examine revealed in March within the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its take a look at topics discovered that reminiscences are probably shaped by damaged and repaired strands of DNA.
In fact, there are moral implications and results that might have to be addressed if such a system had been to develop into a actuality. Al-Ghaili says Cognify might occur inside a decade from now however solely “if we might overcome the moral restrictions that restrict testing such expertise.”
If that doesn’t ship a shiver up your backbone, then verify your wrist for a pulse. Horror anthology followers like me will bear in mind an episode from the Nineties reboot of The Outer Limits on Showtime known as “The Sentence” by which a scientist performed by David Hyde Pierce invents a really comparable digital jail system that simulates a lifetime sentence inside a matter of minutes. He, after all, topics himself to his personal invention that makes him consider he dedicated a homicide and served a complete lifetime in jail. He wakes up solely to start out denouncing the very system he championed only a few minutes earlier.
You’ll be able to watch the entire thing on YouTube free of charge. Somebody ought to ship it to this man.