Happy Sci-Friday! Cognify: The Mind Prison
The Future of Incarceration is all in your Head.
The future holds more possibilities than most of us can currently wrap our collective heads around.
The world we know is changing faster than we can keep up with. These changes can complicate our world in ways we can’t yet imagine, or they could change society for the better.
AI could help bring some of our more antiquated systems and practices into the 21st century, like our prison system.
The basic idea of what a prison is hasn’t changed much in the last century, and some of the prisons that are still in use are more than a century old.
Our prisons house people of all kinds, from white-collar criminals to the absolute worst of humanity.
Convicted citizens serve decades-long sentences locked in a cell, fed three times a day, and released back into society without any real attempt at rehabilitation.
In the distant future, prisons may look entirely different than they look today, Cognify is a new way to look at how we incarcerate our guilty.
Inside their minds.
Cognify inundates future prisoners with AI-generated memories of their crimes from the perspective of their victims, so they have to re-live the incident from the other side, forcing the offender to take a walk in the shoes of the victim.
Upon sentencing, the convicted would get a choice between serving out a lengthy prison sentence in a traditional facility or serving their time in minutes in a system similar to Cognify.
The focus is on rehabilitation rather than just punishment, treating the incarcerated more like patients than prisoners.
But what if this goes wrong?
It could become more of a dystopian nightmare than a system for rehabilitating offenders, especially if other humans are involved, which they may be.
If this system was controlled by AI then in theory we shouldn’t see the sadism that can occur when one human is in charge of “rehabilitating” another.
On the other hand, if some of our fears regarding AI come true, and they become malevolent, then who knows what kind of depravity could happen?
Using technology like this in a prison has many ethical implications, you can only implant so many non-organic memories into someone’s consciousness before they aren’t that person anymore, but in this case, maybe that’s the point.
What do you think of this kind of Sci-Fi mind prison?
Sci-Friday has become bigger than anyone ever thought it would thanks to an ever-growing list of contributors.
In a perfect world, this might work. But in our world, I think prison would only be a start. After that, I think humanity would move downward at warp speed.
Goodness. I can't even begin to signify the allure of such a story. There are so many nuances to the concept of a mind prison especially in the context of AI. I mean there is always a possibility the AI might develop some quirky personality and the rest will be either a nightmare or real treatment. Then there is also the human question, there will definitely be a good backlash against it. So yeah, it is certainly something I have thought about and may already have a story about too! Great post Chef!