"Don’t Build Mindreading" by Celer

“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”

–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush

Context: Conduit is building datasets to enable telepathy, to use their term.

I saw my grandfather lose control over his own fingers: what I would have given to offer him a headband that read his thoughts. Through novel technologies we have liberated almost all Americans from farming, driven the child and infant mortality rate from the pre-industrial half to less than half a percent in the best-performing countries, and rendered famine a political choice: broad-based improvements in efficiency are good and should be pursued for their own sake. Telepathy offers more: we could create trust through verified honesty, helping us ensure prosperity and peace. DARPA is already looking into “preconscious” thoughts for suicide prevention. There's also a strong argument centered on AI Safety: the models are becoming superhuman, and this is technology to allow us to keep pace, minimize hostile competition, and perhaps survive into the future.

This is what Conduit is promising. Unfortunately, mindreading will have other effects.

Oskar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jewish lives during the Holocaust. He did it by [...]

---

First published:
August 7th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CAdG5dzkWrrK2NQg8/don-t-build-mindreading

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.