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AI has opened another door to our inevitable dystopian future with a new prison concept that proposes bombarding criminals with artificial memories from the perspective of their victims.
The “prison of the future” video was unveiled on Instagram this week, showing our digitally-rendered dystopia involving sending offenders into Matrix-style pods where they’re fitted with headsets – named a Cognify device – and fed a stream of AI-generated content which supposedly will give prisoners a taste of their own medicine.
If a person commits a violent crime, they are forced to watch their crime from the victim’s perspective. Drug-related crimes might be punished with fake memories that “simulate the struggles of addiction and recovery”. At the same time, emotional states like remorse and regret would be triggered by tweaking neurotransmitters and hormones in real time.
Argument over ‘eye-for-an-eye’ aside, this is the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
According to the video, prisoners will be given a choice between a traditional prison sentence, or the AI-fed ‘rehabilitation’. If a prisoner chooses to undergo the Clockwork Orange-inspired sentence, they would then be allowed to reenter society as a ‘cured’ individual.
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While the loopy video is very sci-fi, the idea is however based on actual science.
Scientists have already successfully implanted false memories in mice, and have figured out how to change ‘fearful’ memories into happy ones. In 2018 researchers transferred a memory from one marine snail to another, and a year later they figured out how to code a film clip into the DNA of the gut bacteria E. coli.
The actual idea behind Cognify came from a Berlin-based filmmaker and science communicator, Hashem Al-Ghaili, who believes it could address issues such as false imprisonment, overcrowding, and ineffective rehabilitation in prisons by providing “a more effective path to reformation and societal reintegration”.
“I don’t think it makes sense to base the outcomes of any technology on dystopian plots. Sure, we need to be cautious, but we also need to give technology a chance to make our lives better.”
“Brainwashing using Cognify is very unlikely to happen if such technology is fully protected from falling into the wrong hands.”
The problem with Al-Ghaili’s idea is that this technology itself feels wrong, regardless of who wields it. Does he really think this would not be used for nefarious reasons? I can’t think of any government, institution, or person in the world that should be allowed to implant memories into people’s minds.
Dial it down a notch science, you’re getting a little scary now.