The Offer. (a tale)

James demonstrated on a dummy head. “the two sensors either side of the temple by the hair line define a position in the brain, the left scans vertically and the right horizontally. Where they cross indicates the position of a single synapse firing. Three point triangulation isn’t necessary as each scan defines a line on its plane synchronous to the firing” and the machine works at 20 Mhz, fast enough to capture each firing discretely.” Gareth was amazed, “You can do that!?” “Well the brain is pretty slow compared with modern electronics. So the coordinates are logged as a succession of events that we can plot in 3D here.” The screen showed a crazy zigzag trace. “We can slow it down and run a video. Here a guy is recognising a cat. You can see the activity in this area, which stops and those two areas begin doing something else, possibly memories and feelings for other cats, that sort of thing.” “Wow.” “Before we could see activity but nowhere near in this detail.” “That’s amazing.” “Well that’s just the beginning. By exposing a subject to a wide range of stimuli we’re beginning to piece together the subject’s general processing synapse by synapse.” “So put those things on me and you’ll know.. “ “No, no. Experience is built individually. One subject’s patterning will be quite different to another's, but we can see many processing similarities. Here for example the subject is remembering a cat, imagining or drawing a cat. That synapse cluster is used in all of these, perception, memory, imagination and most probably dreams. It’s the go to cluster for anything cats. It also shows there's no difference between them, just one real-time process that does them all.” "You mean we don't actually remember things?" "Well there's no such thing as a fixed data bank we can refer to. We just piece together a narative from snippets like this cat cluster into something acceptable to our real time processing." “So what are you going to use all this for? AI or something.” “No we’re not interested in alien world domination.” “But it could?” “Most definitely. No, we’re interested in human intelligence. You see human cognition, though it is quite amazing and the brain even more so considering it size and power requirements, is flawed. Well not flawed exactly, rather there are many ways it can lead us astray. Good thinking is achieved rarely and after much work and experience. Our aim is to expand good thinking into the larger population.” “You’re going to tell us what to think?” “God no.” “Well that’s what it sounds like to me.” “No. We will be able to identify destructive patterns of thought that lead to unhappiness, anger, depression, violence etc. So many people are… “ “That’s control; it’s getting into people’s heads.” “But people go to therapists and get relief.” “That’s different.” “Would you rather we use it for AI then?” “Absolutely. That way ‘it’ will get super intelligent and we’ll be able to use it, learn from it.” “And it won’t control you?” “No, why should it? It’ll just be a tool like social media.” “But is that what you really want? Wouldn’t you rather learn how to think well for yourself?” “No, I think perfectly well as I am thank you.”