It is not a matter of if, but when, a machine will be able to read your mind. Before that happens, “neurorights” should be established by governments around the world to safeguard citizens’ brains from neurotechnology.
In the digital age, privacy is a myth. Everything you do and say can be heard and seen by anyone who is connected to the internet. The only place that is truly yours and no one else’s is your mind. But that may not last for long.
Neuralink, a project by Elon Musk, may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie. But it is only a matter of time before there is a machine that can access and possibly manipulate your mind. Some proponents of Neurorights, or human rights specifically designed to protect the brain, want to regulate this technology before it becomes a reality.
A paper by Jack Gallant, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley, and other researchers showed a simple way of “reading minds.” They asked volunteers to watch hours of video clips while they scanned their brains with an MRI machine. They then trained an AI model on a dataset that linked brain activity to each video frame. Next, they asked the volunteers to watch new videos while still scanning their brains. They then fed the new data into the AI model that they had trained earlier. The model was able to produce a blurry but recognizable reconstruction of some of the images that the volunteers watched. The paper, by the way, was published in 2011.
In 2021, Chile’s senate passed a bill, the first of its kind in the world, to amend the constitution to protect “neuro rights” or brain rights. This made Chile the first country in the world to enshrine neurorights in its constitution. But was the South American country too hasty?
Guido Girardi, a former Chilean senator who played a key role in the legislation, compared neurotechnology to something else that lawmakers might have been slow to respond to—social media. Chile did not want to repeat the same mistake. Neurotechnology, when it becomes more widespread, might have greater consequences for society than social media. The argument here is that maybe it is wise to be proactive about the technology for once.
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