Based on the Prison Policy Institute, the US has a better incarceration fee per 100,000 folks in its inhabitants than another NATO nation and it’s even increased 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 an alternative. 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 recollections in a digital setting. 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 components of their DNA and RNA linked to reminiscence formation to determine a long run reminiscence sample.
At present, such know-how doesn’t exist and Cognify is barely a proposal. Nevertheless, Al-Ghaili claims that experiments carried out on animals show this course of may work on people in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later. As an illustration, a examine printed in March within the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its check topics discovered that recollections are probably shaped by damaged and repaired strands of DNA.
In fact, there are moral implications and results that may have to be addressed if such a system had been to change into a actuality. Al-Ghaili says Cognify may occur inside a decade from now however solely “if we may overcome the moral restrictions that restrict testing such know-how.”
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 Nineteen Nineties reboot of The Outer Limits on Showtime referred to as “The Sentence” through which a scientist performed by David Hyde Pierce invents a really related digital jail system that simulates a lifetime sentence inside a matter of minutes. He, in fact, topics himself to his personal invention that makes him consider he dedicated a homicide and served a whole lifetime in jail. He wakes up solely to begin denouncing the very system he championed just some minutes earlier.
You’ll be able to watch the whole thing on YouTube at no cost. Somebody ought to ship it to this man.
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