In line with the Jail Coverage Institute, the US has the next incarceration price 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 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 appears to be like downright horrifying.
Right here’s how Cognify works in a theoretical nutshell — As a substitute of locking prisoners up for lengthy intervals of time, prisoners could be subjected to synthetic reminiscences 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 the moment, such know-how doesn’t exist and Cognify is just 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. For example, a research revealed in March within the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its check topics discovered that reminiscences are presumably fashioned by damaged and repaired strands of DNA.
After all, there are moral implications and results that will should be addressed if such a system have 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 examine 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 known as “The Sentence” wherein a scientist performed by David Hyde Pierce invents a really comparable digital jail system that simulates a life-time sentence inside a matter of minutes. He, after all, topics himself to his personal invention that makes him imagine he dedicated a homicide and served a complete lifetime in jail. He wakes up solely to start out denouncing the very system he championed just some minutes earlier.
You possibly can watch the entire thing on YouTube without spending a dime. Somebody ought to ship it to this man.