DOUGLAS ADAMS, the late lamented author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", dreamed up many comic creations. One of his greatest was the Babel fish. This interstellar ichthyoid neatly disposed of a problem all science-fiction au- thors have: how to let alien species talk to one another. It did so by acting as a mind-reader that translated thoughts between different races and cultures. Universal communication did not, unfortunately, lead to universal harmony. As Adams put it, "The poor Babel fish has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." For the moment, mind-reading is still science fiction. But that may not be true for much longer. Several lines of inquiry (see page 81) are converging on the idea that the neurological activity of the brain can be decoded directly, and people's thoughts revealed without being spoken. Just imagine the potential benefits. Such a development would allow both the fit and the disabled to operate machines merely by choosing what they want those machines to do. It would permit the profoundly handicapped-those paralysed by conditions such as motor-neuron disease and cerebral palsy—to communicate more easily than is now possible even with the text-based speech engines used by the likes of Stephen Hawking. It might unlock the mental prisons of people apparently in comas, who nevertheless show some signs of neural activity. For the able-bodied, it could allow workers to dictate documents silently to computers simply by thinking about what they want to say. The most profound implication, however, is that it would abolish the ability to lie.
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