The author argues in this book that neurotechnology will soon become the “universal controller” for all of our interactions with technology. This can benefit humanity immensely, but without safeguards, it can seriously threaten our fundamental human rights to privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination. This book offers a path forward to navigate the complex legal and ethical dilemmas that will fundamentally impact our freedom to understand, shape, and define ourselves.
Some questions this book poses:
Should we - or will we want to - directly track information gleaned from our own brains, or have that information filtered for us by a trusted intermediary instead, much as we count on medical doctors to make sense of an MRI or CT scan?
Is it cheating to enhance our brains with drugs or devices that help us to learn faster or concentrate longer than we otherwise could?
Does society have the right to prohibit us from slowing down our brains or extinguishing painful memories?
What will it mean if our thoughts and emotions are up for grabs, just like the rest of our data being commodified and sold by corporations?
Should employers be allowed to use that data as part of the growing trend of workplace surveillance?
Are there any limits to corporations targeting our brains with their products?
Does freedom of thought protect us from government tracking our brains and mental processes?
Will unlocking our brains open our minds to targeted assaults and hacking, and if so, how do we protect ourselves against that risk?
Is embracing neurotechnology necessary for the very survival of our species to compete against the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence?
People may willingly allow corporations access to their brain data:
By now, most people realize that “free” digital services come at the expense of an individual’s personal data. While Google originally sought to “bring order to the web” and provide “high quality search results”, it now commands 92 percent of the search engine market in the United States.
Through its business model, default settings, and privacy policies, 23andMe has included 80 percent of its 10.7 million customers in a database that associates millions of raw genome sequences with consumer demographics and other information, enabling large-scale analyses of genetic diseases and their indicators.
In a neuromarketing study conducted by IKEA, customers willingly allowed the company to monitor their EEG data while making shopping decisions, and “not a single prospective customer objected to using the EEG device and everyone had a great time.”
Companies are already adopting neurotech in consumer goods:
Snap (the company behind Snapchat) has acquired Paris-based neurotech company NextMind, known for its EEG-based brain wave controller. Snap plans to integrate the technology into their augmented reality platform, to “monitor neural activity to understand your intent when interacting with a computing interface, allowing you to push virtual button simply by focusing on it,” the company explained in their blog post announcing the acquisition.
Microsoft has obtained a patent on an EEG device that allows users to navigate web browsers and apps with their brains and will reward people with cryptocurrency for doing so.
Employers are already adopting neurotech to monitor workers
The UK grocery chain Tesco was one of the first companies to employ such surveillance. In 2013, it required workers in its grocery warehousing facilities in Ireland and the UK to wear armbands that tracked their productivity. Every time a worker picked up a piece of inventory and moved it from one place to another, the armband logged those movements. It also tracked bathroom breaks.
Amazon also has a patented wristband to track its employees, as well as a broad surveillance program called AWS Panorama, which uses machine learning algorithms to process images from cameras, including the security cameras that are ubiquitous at most modern worksites.
SmartCap Technologies has partnered with the American trucking industry to monitor driver fatigue in real time via EEG.
But we need to ask some important questions about employer use of neurotech. Given the lack of societal norms and laws regarding brain monitoring, for now each company creates its own. Will employees receive real-time feedback from the devices so they can act on it themselves? Will managers directly monitor employees’ incidence of fatigue? If so, will they use that information to improve workplace conditions? Or will it justify disciplinary actions, pay cuts, and terminations of employees who suffer from fatigue more often?
Governments are investing in neurotech as well
The US Department of Defense recently funded SPARK Neuro, a New York-based company that has been working on a biometric system that combines EEG brain wave data, changes in sweat gland activity, facial recognition, eye-tracking, and even functional near-infrared spectrometry brain imaging (fNIRS), a particularly promising (if expensive) technology for brain authentication, since it is wearable, can be used to monitor individuals over time, can be used indoors or outdoors while a person is moving or at rest, and can be used on infants and children.
Like other countries, the United States is investing heavily in military applications of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology in the hope of creating super soldiers that can control swarms of drones with their minds, communicate and upload data brain-to-brain, and identify targets subconsciously.
Governments are even using it to catch criminals. Brainwave Science sells a technology called iCognative, which can extract information from people’s brains. Among its customers are the Bangladeshi defense forces as well as several Middle Eastern governments. Following some successful experiments at the Dubai Police Academy, Emirati authorities have recently deployed the technology in real murder investigations. At least two cases have successfully been prosecuted in Dubai. In one case, the police were investigating a killing at a warehouse. Suspecting that an employee was involved, they forced the warehouse workers to don EEG headsets and showed them images of the crime. Purportedly, a photo of the murder weapon triggered a characteristic “recognition” pattern in one of the employee’s brains (the P300 wave), while none of the other employees showed a similar response. Confronted with that evidence, the suspect confessed, revealing details that only the guilty party could have known.
In late 2021, the US government blacklisted twelve Chinese institutes and firms it believed to be working on dangerous “biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses,” including “purported brain-control weaponry.
Should people have access to their own brain data?
Many doctors, regulators, and cultures believe that information about our health and medical treatments should be filtered and contextualized, and that to do otherwise causes unnecessary and avoidable harm, while others believe that the patient’s right to informed consent requires sharing with them more fully.
A recent survey of Chinese doctors found that 98 percent of them would tell family members about a cancer diagnosis before telling the patient, and 82 percent would follow the family’s wishes as to whether the patient should be told.27 While the Western approach to disclosure of information is now different, it hasn’t been that way for very long. Generation X and millennials are far less likely than the generations before them to trust health-care providers, and far more likely to trust self-directed information.
However, the author believes that the view that consumers are too health illiterate to justify self-access to their brains belittles the average person and denies them the opportunity to become more educated. To teach a person to read, you wouldn’t take away their books; you would teach them how to read them. Requiring an expert to filter all our data is like allowing only experts to read books to the illiterate out loud. She believes that instead, we should penalize companies that consistently produce inaccurate data. To do so is to mandate a corporate duty of discovery and effective disclosure: to honestly label their products, do their part in educating consumers, and only sell products that have been vetted by objective parties to ensure that they do what they say they do.
Are cognitive enhancers cheating?
In 2011, in response to pressure from students, Duke University, changed its academic integrity policy to count the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs for nonmedical reasons as cheating. Violators faced expulsion.
The author believes that improving our brains’ function isn’t cheating, whether we do it through studying, exercising, diet, brain-training games, devices, or neuroenhancing drugs. The gradual improvement of our brains over time is fundamental to human flourishing; it is a social good that we can and should pursue. Moreover, it is a social good that we pursue all the time. Further, she argues that making them more available is a better way to level the playing field than restricting access to those few who can game the system to obtain them or afford the high price of the black market.
She also believes comparing the use of brain enhancers to using steroids in sports is a flawed analogy. She argues that life isn’t a competitive game with winners and losers and spectators on the sidelines. Brain improvement is not zero-sum. All of us stand to gain something from it. She also makes the interesting point that reasonable people could disagree as to whether the “spirt of sport” privileges those who have won the genetic lottery over those who could achieve the same effects through ingesting or injecting other agents into their bodies. She does agree with the welfare concern involved, and thinks safety should be a top priority for cognitive enhancers.
The author isn’t impressed by the argument of coercion though, stating that the claim of coercion doesn’t justify social limits on enhancement. We can and often do freely choose not to do something that makes us more competitive, choosing to take a vacation rather than working longer hours, or spending time with friends instead of studying more for an exam for example.
What counts as unacceptable brain manipulation?
Our unconscious mind is primed all the time through regular “strength” stimuli (rather than hidden and subliminal ones). Think of the popcorn and soda advertisements before a movie begins. They are hardly hidden, but they play to our baked-in desires.
However, the author argues that when a person or entity tries to override our will by making it exceedingly difficult to act consistently with our desires, and they act with the intention to cause actual harm, they violate our freedom of action, and our right to cognitive liberty should be invoked as a reason to regulate their conduct.
She discusses an interesting experiment conducted by Coors in which the company teamed up with Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist who is an expert on dreams, and created a film with specific audio and visual stimuli. In exchange for half off a twelve-pack of Coors beer (or a free twelve-pack if shared with a friend), Coors invited participants to watch a ninety-second video featuring images of mountains and Coors beer right before going to bed, and then listen to a soundscape while they were sleeping. When they woke up, they were asked what they had dreamed about. Dr. Barrett claimed the “participants reported similar dream experiences, including refreshing streams, mountains, waterfalls, and even Coors itself.” This was facilitated by the fact that upon awakening from a dream, we have a period of about twenty minutes before blood flow is fully reestablished to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, during which we are more suggestible.
The author warns that though in the case above, the participants consented, nonconsensual dream incubation - whether used to benefit or harm us - falls much closer to the wrong end of the spectrum between innocent influence and intentionally assaulting the brain, and should be regulated.
Some protective frameworks are already in place
Although the normative foundation for human rights began well before the founding of the UN in 1945, the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 was a crucial milestone. The declaration outlines thirty rights and freedoms necessary to secure human dignity to every person and forms the basis for modern international human rights law. The UDHR established important global norms about human rights and created moral obligations for governments, corporations, and individuals to follow and international condemnation when they fail to do so.
Both privacy and freedom of thought are already protected by the UDHR. Article 12 of the UDHR states that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.”
What should we do next?
Ongoing assessment of the risks of neurotechnology is already happening. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the International Neuroethics Society, the IEEE Brain initiative, and the NeuroRights Foundation, to name but a few, have held convenings to discuss ethical progress in neurotechnology. A group of corporate executives and scholars have called for a White House task force to “craft a roadmap for the effective governance of applied neuroscience technologies.”
Recognizing an international human right to cognitive liberty would make it a clear legal priority to protect our mental experiences as much as our other physical ones. Doing so would guide future conversations about the implementation of neurotechnology - whether used in healthcare, education, in the workplace, or by the military.