Apart from the silly ending, “Brainstorm” (1983) is an excellent movie. Unfortunately, it’s no longer science fiction and we’re in a world with no legal framework to deal with the technological scenario it portrays. New technologies are exceeding society’s comprehension, oversight and regulation. As with environmentalists, more knowledgeable and mature-minded scientists are raising the alarm. They’re warning of the dangers of unchecked novel IT and applications, whether in “wrong hands”, as defined by the powers-of-the-day, or not. Like insighted scientists and tech pioneers, philosophers and commentators of the past, from Russell, Einstein, Popper and Kuhn to Asimov, Sagan and Clarke, they’re attempting to lead intelligent discourse beyond childish “us and them” warlike paradigms to recognition of the broader consequences of potentially world-destroying and, certainly, society-destroying applications. Who needs nukes when you can control lives and minds with neural chips and AI programs running all surveillance and financial systems. But, like environmentalists, they’re being censored, ridiculed, silenced, bullied and ignored by those with vested interests, overgrown adolescents playing out high school science project fantasies or superficial glorifiers of science living in the 1950s, but who, unlike their 1950s superiors, have no grasp of social reality. Time for Peter Pan to grow up.