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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

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" [nih.gov], 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 [vox.com].

“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” [cognitiveliberty.org] — 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.

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 [cmail20.com] 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.

Original Submission