DARPA funds $70 million for brain implants for emotional mind control

The positive spin is DARPA is spending $70 million for a program that will try to develop brain implants able to regulate emotions in the mentally ill and the negative spin is US military researchers are developing brain implants for mind control.

The U.S. military has a goal to use brain implants to read, and then control, the emotions of mentally ill people.

Negative spin – The US military has turned recruits into crazy killing machines and now they want to use brain implants to make them safer when the veterans are integrated back into society. Alternatively they can use the brain implants to make the human killing machines even more immune to fear or other emotions.

Positive spin and perspective – We can already remove the human element from weapons (bombs, precision missiles etc…) so killing without emotion has been easy. So it is good that any mentally ill, addicts and other people get more effective control than drugs can currently provide to blunt their bad tendencies. We can also help people with emotional control issues or problems with self control get more emotional control. This could help solve big societal problems (too much drinking, obesity, etc…) and people could become more productive and happy.

Negative examples from Fiction

Mean “Mean Machine” Angel is a villain in the Judge Dredd stories of the British comic book series 2000 AD.

Mean Machine’s dial settings are:
* Surly
* Mean
* Vicious
* Brutal

There is also the cyborg character Deathlok from Marvel Comics.

This week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, awarded two large contracts to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco, to create electrical brain implants capable of treating seven psychiatric conditions, including addiction, depression, and borderline personality disorder.

The project builds on expanding knowledge about how the brain works; the development of microlectronic systems that can fit in the body; and substantial evidence that thoughts and actions can be altered with well-placed electrical impulses to the brain.

“Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” says Carmena, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and involved in the UCSF-led project. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.”

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