A team of researchers is laying the groundwork for a chilling new concept that sounds like the premise of a dystopian sci-fi film: through advancements in bio-technology, it may be possible for convicted criminals of the near future to serve out thousand-year prison sentences within their own minds.
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According to a story in UK's Telegraph, the team leader, philosopher Rebecca Roache, is examining the possibility of using drugs to alter a prisoner's perception of time so that a centuries-long jail sentence could be compressed into a much shorter period. An even more disturbing approach – but still technologically out of our reach – could involve uploading a human's consciousness to a computer and altering their sense of reality... sounds a lot like The Matrix, doesn't it?
“Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours,” Roache said in an interview with Aeon. “This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.”
While these ideas are only abstract concepts at the moment, the technology may catch up to them soon; the time-altering effects of some psychotropic drugs are already documented by scientists.
The moral implications of these approaches were also addressed in the team's research: “Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free?” Roache added. “When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments – the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future.”
A more optimistic dream of the future almost became reality in a small Vermont town... but it might have ended up a nightmare much like Stephen King's Under the Dome!