Last week, Wired‘s Cade Metz gave us a peek into the Facebook Behavior Modification Laboratory, which is more popularly known as the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Laboratory. Run by Yann LeCun, an NYU data scientist, the lab is developing a digital assistant that will act as your artificial conscience and censor. Perched on your shoulder like one of those cartoon angels, it will whisper tsk tsk into your ear when your online behavior threatens to step beyond the bounds of propriety.

[LeCun] wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

It’s Kubrick’s HAL refashioned as Mr. Buzzkill. “Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

The secret to the technology is an AI technique known as machine learning, a statistical modeling tool through which a computer gains a kind of experiential knowledge of the world. In this case, Facebook would, by monitoring your uploaded words and photos, be able to read your moods and intentions. The company would, for instance, be able to “distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self.” That would enable Facebook to “guide you in directions you may not go on your own.” Says LeCun: “Imagine that you had an intelligent digital assistant which would mediate your interaction with your friends.”

Yes, imagine.

“Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”

If and when Facebook perfects its behavior modification algorithms, it would be a fairly trivial exercise to expand their application beyond the realm of shitfaced snapshots. That photo you’re about to post of the protest rally you just marched in? That angry comment about the president? That wild thought that just popped into your mind? You know, maybe those wouldn’t go down so well with the boss.

“And as our senses have gone outside us,” Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962, while contemplating the ramifications of what he termed a universal, digital nervous system, “Big Brother goes inside.”

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here. A full listing of posts can be found here. Also see: Automating the feels.