New blog post on the ASU College of Global Future’s Dean’s Blog:
The ethics of advanced brain machine interfaces — and why they matter
What, you might ask, have advanced brain machine interfaces got to do with global futures?
Quite a lot as it turns out!
A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a discussion on the the governance and ethics of brain machine interface technologies in a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Science, Technology and the Law (my comments are at the end of this article). This was a scoping discussion to get a sense of the potential issues here that may need to be addressed moving forward, and was prompted in part by the developments coming out of Elon Musk’s company Neuralink.
Much as Musk has had an outsized impact on electric vehicles, the space industry, and even tunnel boring, he’s setting out to transform the brain machine interface business.
His vision is one of Lasik-like clinics where you can have a set of probes inserted into your cortex in a matter of minutes which has the ability to not only read what your neurons are doing, but can write to them as well–all through a wireless smartphone app.
Not surprisingly, early applications are focused on medical interventions, including the ability to counter the effects of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s disease, and restoring mobility to people with damaged spinal cords.
But what the folks at Neuralink really want to do is to create brain machine interfaces that massively enhance human performance–everything from gaming experiences where your brain is literally plugged into the console, to telepathy, and even symbiosis with artificial intelligence… [Read more]
