A Vox report that swiftly sparked alarm across the internet Friday outlined how, "in the era of neurocapitalism, your brain needs new rights," following recent revelations that Facebook and Elon Musk's Neuralink are developing technologies to read people's minds.
As Vox's Sigal Samuel reported:
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.
Considering those and other companies' advances and ambitions, Samuel warned that "your brain, the final privacy frontier, may not be private much longer" and laid out how existing laws are not equipped to handle how these emerging technologies could "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."
My god.
"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."https://t.co/H8EeBijuco
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 30, 2019
Samuel interviewed neuroethicist Marcello Ienca, a researcher at ETH Zurich who published a paper in 2017 detailing four human rights for the neurotechnology age that he believes need to be protected by law. Ienca told Samuel, "I'm very concerned about the commercialization of brain data in the consumer market."
"And I'm not talking about a farfetched future. We already have consumer neurotech, with people trading their brain data for services from private companies," he said, pointing to video games that use brain activity and wearable devices that monitor human activities such as sleep. "I'm tempted to call it neurocapitalism."
The Vox report broke down the four rights that, according to Ienca, policymakers need to urgently safeguard with new legislation:
"Brain data is the ultimate refuge of privacy. When that goes, everything goes," Ienca said. "And once brain data is collected on a large scale, it's going to be very hard to reverse the process."
Samuel's report generated concerned commentary on Twitter, with readers calling the piece "the scariest thing you'll read all day" and declaring, "I do not want to live in this future."
In case you were sleeping too well lately https://t.co/KIPtFSXUpv
— Joe Stewart-Sicking (@revjoess) August 30, 2019
Tech reporter Benjamin Powers tweeted, "So how long until this is co-opted for national security purposes?"
Ienca, in his interview with Samuel, noted that the Defense Department's advanced research agency is assessing how neurotechnologies could be used on soldiers. As he explained, "there is already military-funded research to see if we can monitor decreases in attention levels and concentration, with hybrid BCIs that can 'read' deficits in attention levels and 'write' to the brain to increase alertness through neuromodulation. There are DARPA-funded projects that attempt to do so."
"The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time." So how long until this is co-opted for national security purposes? https://t.co/Uoo5XQ09Fh
— Benjamin Powers (@benjaminopowers) August 30, 2019
Such technologies raise concerns about abuse not only by governments but also by corporations.
Journalist Noah Kulwin compared brain-reading tech to self-driving cars, suggesting that the former "can't possibly work as presently marketed," and given that governments aren't prepared with human rights protections, companies will be empowered to "do a bunch of unregulated experimentation."
This sounds like self-driving cars. The technology can’t possibly work as presently marketed, and the government not being prepared=it’s just going to let companies do a bunch of unregulated experimentation https://t.co/QmCWG4Ydh1
— noah kulwin (@nkulw) August 30, 2019
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Not content with monitoring almost everything you do online, Facebook now wants to read your mind as well. The social media giant recently announced a breakthrough in its plan to create a device that reads people’s brainwaves to allow them to type just by thinking. And Elon Musk wants to go even further. One of the Tesla boss’s other companies, Neuralink, is developing a brain implant to connect people’s minds directly to a computer.
Technology is increasingly hacking our brains. From typing 100 words per minute with your thoughts to your mind confessing crimes without verbalizing them. From wearables, to hearables, to sensors all around us, privacy is disappearing. Aaron Dykes of Truthstream Media breaks down how these brain-hacking technologies are being used and their potential ethical questions.
DARPA is perhaps the most disturbing entity in existence today. The Department of Defense’s research arm is paying scientists to invent ways to instantly read soldiers’ minds using tools like genetic engineering and the end goal is “thought-controlled weapons.”
Last month a team of scientists affiliated with Elon Musk’s Neuralink project published a paper identifying a new technique for inserting probes into brains. The study was published in a journal called BioRxiv, and according to Bloomberg, all five of its authors have been associated with Nueralink. It was noted at the end of the study that the research was funded through a DARPA Contract.
When Mark Zuckerberg isn't smoking meat or cooking up excuses for data harvesting scandals, the 34-year-old Facebook CEO and his wife Priscilla Chan are high-fiving over their investments in the mind-control game, according to Business Insider.Funded by their for-profit biomedical research company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the Silicon Valley power couple is helping to fund research that could vastly improve the lives of people suffering from neuromotor disorders - or create an army of compliant cyborgs trained to take Mark seriously.