KellerScholl

“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush Context: Conduit is building datasets to enable telepathy, to use their term. I saw my grandfather lose control over his own fingers: what I would have given to offer him a headband that read his thoughts. Through novel technologies we have liberated almost all Americans from farming, driven the child and infant mortality rate from the pre-industrial half to less than half a percent in the best-performing countries, and rendered famine a political choice: broad-based improvements in efficiency are good and should be pursued for their own sake. Telepathy offers more: we could create trust through verified honesty, helping us ensure prosperity and peace. DARPA is already looking into “preconscious” thoughts for suicide prevention. There’s also a strong argument centered on AI Safety: the models are becoming superhuman, and this is technology to allow us to keep pace, minimize hostile competition, and perhaps survive into the future. This is what Conduit is promising. Unfortunately, mindreading will have other effects. Oskar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jewish lives during the Holocaust. He did it by lying, frequently, and repeatedly, combined with spending his entire fortune on construction and in the black market: luxuries for corrupt officials and food for his Jewish workers. All of this was against the will of the Third Reich. They launched investigations, and even caught some of the people he was bribing. If you imagine Nazis with mindreading, so they can tell whenever someone is lying to them, there goes Schindler and his employees. Along with him goes every official who suddenly became incapable of spotting forged documents when grandmothers needed to escape disintegrating Yugoslavia, every Polish and Egyptian soldier unwilling to fire on a protesting population, and everyone else who would take the opportunity,