In keeping with the Jail Coverage Institute, the US has the next incarceration price per 100,000 folks in its inhabitants than every other NATO nation and it’s even greater than the following 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 bought 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 appears downright horrifying.
Right here’s how Cognify works in a theoretical nutshell — As an alternative of locking prisoners up for lengthy durations of time, prisoners could be subjected to synthetic reminiscences in a digital setting. The system creates personalized 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.
Presently, such know-how doesn’t exist and Cognify is barely a proposal. Nonetheless, Al-Ghaili claims that experiments carried out on animals show this course of might work on people sooner or later sooner or later. As an illustration, a research revealed in March within the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its check topics discovered that reminiscences are probably fashioned by damaged and repaired strands of DNA.
After all, there are moral implications and results that may must be addressed if such a system had been to turn 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 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 keep in mind an episode from the 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 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 whole lifetime in jail. He wakes up solely to start out denouncing the very system he championed just some minutes earlier.
You may watch the entire thing on YouTube free of charge. Somebody ought to ship it to this man.
