My Brain Scan Can Read Your Intentions

For example, I knew you would click on that.

Oh how coy.

Anyway, an article in The Guardian ("The brain scan that can read people's intentions") reports on this: "A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act."

Quoth those Brits:

The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues surrounding future uses for the technology. If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals and terrorists, and even usher in a "Minority Report" era...where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.

These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we're not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared," Professor Haynes told the Guardian.

But Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, also observes:

We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.

Are we left with the classic two options?

1. Pfft. Everything's gonna be fine, stop worrying.
2. Oh my. What are you people doing?!?

In either case, this is the 21st century, and this is the common trope (per Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University): "Rapid advances in neuroscience had forced scientists in the field to set up their own neuroethics society late last year to consider the ramifications of their research."

Nanotechnology, biotechnology (genetic modification for food, health, and industry), neuroscience, this is our world. So wait, let me rephrase the above as a question instead: Is "scientists in the field...set up their own...ethics society late last year" the common refrain?