SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Changes in technology often produce ethical quandaries that did not previously exist. The successful transplantation of human hearts lead some to re-define death as "brain-death", so as to allow removal of organs for transplants. Now we may be faced with similar need for new definitions and limitations, as tech moves into neural interfaces. The article is to be found at Vox.
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” That’s from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949. The comment is meant to highlight what a repressive surveillance state the characters live in, but looked at another way, it shows how lucky they are: At least their brains are still private.
Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink have announced that they’re building tech to read your mind — literally.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.
And Musk’s company has created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts. Musk wants to start testing in humans by the end of next year.
Of course, with medical technology, one could always make the argument that the issue was saving humans lives. Somehow we do not suspect that Zuckerberg or Musk are contaminated by such motives.
Your brain, the final privacy frontier, may not be private much longer.
Some neuroethicists argue that the potential for misuse of these technologies is so great that we need revamped human rights laws — a new “jurisprudence of the mind” — to protect us. The technologies have the potential to interfere with rights that are so basic that we may not even think of them as rights, like our ability to determine where our selves end and machines begin. Our current laws are not equipped to address this.
It's an in-depth article; a few highlights:
One of the main people pushing for these new human rights is neuroethicist Marcello Ienca, a researcher at ETH Zurich, one of Europe’s top science and technology universities. In 2017, he released a paper outlining four specific rights for the neurotechnology age he believes we should enshrine in law. I reached out to ask what he thought of the recent revelations from Facebook and Neuralink.
The four rights are:
1. The right to cognitive liberty
You should have the right to freely decide you want to use a given neurotechnology or to refuse it.
. . .
2. The right to mental privacy
You should have the right to seclude your brain data or to publicly share it.
. . . .
3. The right to mental integrity
You should have the right not to be harmed physically or psychologically by neurotechnology.
. . .
4. The right to psychological continuity
You should have the right to be protected from alterations to your sense of self that you did not authorize.
Alright, I know what you are thinking; wait, no, I don't! Not really. Let's keep it that way.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday September 19 2019, @01:42AM
Ask the Amish. [npr.org]
Or if you don't want to ask them... (And my numbers are made up for some small degree of simplicity....) When you have 1,000 individual farmers each farming three acres and the farmers get 1 bushel per acre and corn costs $2 per bushel to grow and gets $4 per bushel every farmer has made $6. Nice. But when you have 301 farmers, 300 of which farm three acres and 1 of whom now farms 2,100 acres (previously taken by 700 farmers at 3 acres each) and everything else is the same the 300 farmers make $6 and the big one makes $4,200. You've gotten the same total amount of food out of the system as the prior example (3,000 bushels).
(Actuially because of scale the one with 2,100 acres makes about $6,000 because of increased efficiency and being able to afford better yielding seed, but whatever). The seedmakers will raise prices, farm taxes will go up, and now costs per bushel are $3.50 per acre. The next year your 2,100 acre farmer makes $1,050 but still survives. Your other 300 farmers made $1.50 and their farms are now in foreclosure because they had to spend that $1.50 on their food and clothes and sending their kids to school. No money for seed for next year. The farming conglomerate only spent $300 total for their 200 employees on those costs so they still have the money for seed. (In reality the small farmer will take out a loan or a second mortgage and hope next year is better - but one only gets so many shots at that before nobody will lend to that farmer anymore).
Oh, wait, you thought that the prices would come up to meet those increased costs? Nope. The big guy can afford to absorb the hit, especially if it means there will be another 300 farms in foreclosure next year that the conglomerate will add to their portfolio and take reduced profit margins because they will truly make it up in scale and volume. The conglomerate will still sell theirs at $4 per bushel and the little guys can't hold out - they have to take the higher amount. That's why your bread is still $1.something per loaf today and not $10.00 per loaf as it would be with standard inflation. See a graph like this one [inflationdata.com]. There's always enough people who will sell low enough that price inflation is pretty well suppressed on the farmer's end of things even though they do indeed face inflation themselves, and try anything like crazy to get improved efficiency to try and meet it. Including buying out other small farmers if they can.
Sorry, long winded explanation. But the reality is for any industry, anywhere, the little guy can't compete head-to-head with the conglomerate and win. Not without providing some sort of value or additional leverage that makes doing business with them more worthwhile, or finding some efficiencies to eat the inflationary costs. It's why the old aphorism is that the only time a farmer ever really makes money is when they sell the farm off - if they survive.
We haven't gone anywhere near crop insurance, or that a drought year kills small farmers much worse than agribusiness, or that the government pulled subsidies that the small farmers had been riding on, or.....
This sig for rent.