The US Army is developing thought helmets so that military personnel can communicate with each other without speaking.  Eventually, they hope that they will able to control military systems only by thought.

The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

The military’s vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality, let alone implementation.

Thank God.  After they implement it for the military, they will move to the civilian sector.  With any luck, I’ll be dead by the time the thought police become a reality.

The five-year contract it awarded last month to a coalition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to “decode the activity in brain networks” so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades by thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it. Initially, the recipients would most likely hear transmissions rendered by a robotic voice via earphones. But scientists eventually hope to deliver a version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice and indicate the speaker’s distance and direction from the listener.

The problem with this is, how do they overcome the problem that we think a lot of things before making a decision?  How will a fellow soldier be able to decipher the random thoughts in someone’s head and understand which thought is really the command he should be following?  And is it even possible for adults to retrain their brains to think in this way?

Both scientists pre-emptively deny expected charges that they’re literally messing with soldiers’ minds.

Yet.

And don’t overlook potential civilian benefits. “How often have you been annoyed by people screaming into their cell phones?” Schmeisser asks. “What if instead of their Bluetooth earpiece it was a Bluetooth headpiece and their mouth is shut and there’s blessed silence all around you?” Sounds like one of those rare slices of the U.S. military budget even pacifists might support.

There, you see.  They’re already thinking of ways to sell it to the public.  That way, it will seem normal when the police use it against you.