The ethics of advanced brain machine interfaces — and why they matter
Bringing a Silicon-Valley entrepreneurial approach to brain machine interfaces could transform how we interface with computers — but it also comes with some deep ethical challenges.
First published on the Arizona State University College of Global Futures Dean’s Blog.
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.
