Mindreading is coming, what’s the plan?

For all of human history, society has operated under one extremely important constraint: your thoughts are private unless you choose to reveal them. This will soon change. Mindreading is slowly but surely becoming possible. Companies are hard at work making it happen. The point I want to make is so obvious that it probably seems inane: If technology makes mindreading possible, many things we take for granted will massively change. In criminal courts you can ask the suspect: “did you do it? Dictators can learn which of their subordinates are loyal and which are not. When your partner asks you what you think of their baking, you may soon have to reveal that it’s not very good. Thinking about mindreading has led some people to write posts like “don’t build mindreading”. This is all well and good, but here’s the thing: Mindreading IS coming. Probably as soon as the next decade. Unless an active effort is made to prevent this, you should plan for a society where this technology exists. The standard societal response is to first deny any big upheaval as fear-mongering and science fiction, then panic once it’s no longer possible to deny the reality staring us in the face. While this certainly is an option, I think it’s possible to beat this strategy. I don’t know what a better response looks like, but now seems like a good time to start thinking it through. Perhaps strong privacy rights are enough. Perhaps certain uses should be prohibited. Perhaps the technology will be sufficiently difficult to deploy without consent that most of the scary scenarios don’t materialize. But those are good things to think through before mindreading arrives! My claim is that, right now, more or less everyone seems to be treating mindreading as this distant hypothetical. Soon it will not be. So people, what’s the plan? Discuss

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