Brain-Reading Tech is Coming but the Law is Not Ready to Protect us

aristarchus 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", 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:

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