Over the last few hundred years, vision and predictions have preceded thetechnological developments which have turned fantasy to reality and changingthe conditions under which people live. Dreams of the future are presentedalternately with nightmares of a time in which people are enslaved bytechnology, controlled by an elite of despots whose power is based on accessto a technique with the ability to control the human brain. Dr. Frankenstein,Dr. Faust and Dr. Mabouse are all scientists of fantasy who have, to an everincreasing extent, found their successors amongst the medical researchers andthe life scientists of today. In Sweden, as far back as 1946, at Karolinska Hospital's general surgery,patients had their skull opened during operations without their knowledge toenable the implantation of electrodes in their brains. Thus could they be heldhostage to a lifetime of brutal experimentation in which they were connectedvia radio frequencies to a central receiver which made manifest their variouscognitive processes and even neurological functions. These experiments hadalready been performed during the second world war in Germany, in the USSR,the USA. Sweden and around the world to achieve success in a field of researchwhich was being driven by the quest for man's innermost secret - a visioncenturies old of the capability to impart the thoughts, feelings and very soulof an individual to the knowledge of another. BIRTH OF CYBER The book associated with the dawn of the new era since scientists opened upways of researching mankind's soul was published in 1948 by the Americanscientist Norbert Weiner and was entitled "Cybernetics". Justifying this titlehe wrote: "We decided to call the entire field of control andcommunication theory by the name cybernetics which we form from the Greeksteersman...Now I believe the time has come to reconsider cybernetics, notmerely as a program to be carried out some period in the future, but as anexisting science... He who studies the nervous system cannot forget the mind,and he who studies the mind cannot forget the nervous system." |  Yoneji Masuda, the coiner of the term "information society" andauthor of the book; of the same title, in 1980 voiced concern about the threatto our freedom "Further this technology could be used domestically torestrain and control the free private lives and social activities of citizens.Personal privacy could be freely invaded, and people's autonomous social andpolitical activities could be suppressed, to make the fearful, automatedOrwellian state a reality." By brain-computer radio communication, cognitive manifestations such asthoughts or visual impressions, emotions, behavior and psychological clreactions can continually be registered, making it possible for the statescientists, secret police authorities, politicians and medical researchers toobserve an individual in a deeper and more comprehensive way than the personcould possibly do himself. As far as we are able to ascertain, documents which trace the secretintelligence authorities activities in this gruesome science had been draftedas |