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 VIGYAN EDITION DECEMBER 2024

 As the calendar year is ending, the noise over recognising musician Sri T.M. Krishna with an award has not subsided. The Court also had to pass a verdict on the issues that created the noise. The court chose to confine it’s reasonings to the will left by late M.S. Subbalakshmi. It is pertinent to mention that another controversial writer Sri Perumal Murugan, whose right to freedom of expression had to be restored by the Court, has rallied behind Sri T.M. Krishna in shrugging off the controversy as mere intrusion into an individual’s freedom of expression. I do not intend to be eloquent on freedom of expression. My anxieties are on the intrusions happening on freedom of thought! This has close linkages to the inroads made by Artificial Intelligence (AI), on which this publication has been consistently vocal, bordering on paranoia. "Freedom to think is absolute of its own nature; the most tyrannical government is powerless to control the inward workings of the mind", the United States Supreme Court observed in Jones v. City of Opelika (1942). But this dictum holds little water in our dystopic Digital Age when even our neurons are not insulated from state surveillance and manipulation. Now we are left to confront a grave threat to our mental privacy and cognitive liberty with outdated legal provisions and precedents.  Those who surmised George Orwell to be a Cassandra after reading his novel 1984 and the acts of Thought Police in it would be staring at the reality that a non invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) has been developed that can decode continuous language from the brain, so somebody else can read the general gist of what we are thinking even if we haven't uttered a single word. Elon Musk's Neuralink and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta are working on BCIs that could pick up thoughts directly from one's neurons and translate them into words in real time. The Supreme Court recently dismissed a petition filed by one G Venkiteswarlu who alleged that his brain was being controlled by other persons through a machine. The petitioner averred that certain persons had obtained a "human brain reading machinery" from the Central Forensic Scientific Laboratory (CFSL), Hyderabad, and used the same on him. The Supreme Court's magnanimity to admit and hear the petition, despite it being prima facie bizarre, demonstrates the Court's serious concern over the liberty of thought, before dismissing the petition. I am giving the link to the source of these thoughts below.https://www.newindianexpress.com/webonly/2024/Nov/21/liberty-of-thought-a-sitting-duck-inthe-digital-age