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 “Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be."
--- George Orwell

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”
--- Kurt Cobain

     Bill Gates may be planning on living forever as the Lawnmower Man. I am not shitting you. All evidence points towards that end if we browse through the patents Microsoft’s Research and Development team has been working on for the past three years. The pieces are slowly starting to fit, and it’s either that or he’s making Skynet’s road to Armageddon a wee bit easier.

     First, on November 2007, the software company got the patent, for a yet to exist technology, in which a sort of electroencephalogram (EEG) is done on the computer user and a series of algorithms will be built upon neural response to external stimuli. The goal of these algorithms is to discern the cognitive information amongst the haze of electrical impulses within the brain. Although, high criticism has been raised regarding the inescapably eventual jump of this product into the advertising arena; its use on the medical field as a method of communication for bodily incommunicative patients has been hailed as its raison d'être within the intellectual community.

     Secondly, there comes Project Natal. An interactive playing system in which, through the use of a camera adapted to the Xbox 360, the computer recognizes your bodily movements to transform them into the actions of your role-playing avatar. Milo and Kate is an example of facial and voice recognitions as methods of game development; in which you interact with young Milo (or Millie) and the child’s dog, Kate.

     Most recently, Microsoft has been working on a patent for a method of using computers through electromyography (EMG), which employs a system that translates electrical activity from muscles into instructions for the computer. The goal would be to provide access to the system in hands-deprived situations (e.g. a 1 and 10 taxi driver, or a sterilized surgeon).

     I am all for progress, especially in the technology field. However, every new technology must be scrutinized in its best/worst case scenario. Microsoft has heftily covered the best scenario. It’s up to your friendly neighborhood paranoid to fill in the blanks.

     Access to our thoughts, or even to responses in our brain, could be the new system of cataloguing the population; when in hot topic issues it is related. Let me explain, Microsoft’s “mind reader” is plugged in to your computer while you walk into a webpage dealing with abortion. Your neural response to it, cross-checked with the content of the webpage, could very well provide a mapping system into where you lie within the issue.

However, let’s take it a degree darker. Now, the security agencies collect information of individuals that take books (Mein Kempf, for example) from public libraries or buy them with their credit cards. They also tag web surfers that access certain militant websites. In a scenario where this technology exists, neural response could be quantified and “intentions” of the individual formulated. It won’t be long before mass hysteria guides into the creation of a Pre-Crime unit. Rendition would be modified as acceptable. Indoctrination will become the price of freedom. It is a fact that people are willing to sacrifice their right of privacy (and even their nature to think freely) for the modicum of an illusion of security. In the end we all love Big Brother.

     Project Natal and the EMG system would as well become the birthing of a data collecting technology. Project Natal would provide a camera access of not only your facial characteristics but also of your surroundings. Demographic, consumer-based, emotional, neural, and muscular responses could be quantified and added up to a perfect body scan mechanism of your desires and intentions. The machine might as well get to know you better than you know yourself. And the ghost behind the machine would sell the information to the highest bidder of the status quo. Individuality is always a threat; this system would provide the weapons to quench the hazard from a microcosmic approach. Convince us to convince ourselves of who we truly are.

     I sense I might have gone a bit too far. Pardon my insanity, but somehow this makes the voices of John the Revelator, George Orwell, and James Cameron inside my head, demand me to walk around Río Piedras in boxers and socks wearing a two side cardboard that reads “The End is Near.”  Smoke them, if you got them!

Ilustración por Xavier Pagán