The question is not whether there will be a machine that can read your mind. Rather, it is when. Before that, governments across the world need to consider “neurorights” to protect citizens’ brains against neurotechnology.
In today’s digital world, nothing you do and nothing you say is private. Not only do the walls have ears but they are also connected to the internet. There is only one space in the world that is truly private to you and that is your mind. But even that won’t be true for long.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink may seem like it borders on science fiction. But the day is not far when there will be a machine that can read and maybe even alter your mind. Some advocates for Neurorights, or human rights specifically aimed at protecting the brain, want to put in place regulations before this becomes a reality.
Jack Gallant, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley, and other researchers published a paper elaborating on a rudimentary way of “reading minds.” Volunteers in a study were asked to watch hours of video clips while their heads were inside an MRI machine. The researchers then trained a neural network on a dataset that linked recorded brain activity to each corresponding frame of video. After that, the researchers asked the volunteers to watch new videos while still recording MRI data. They then fed the data into the AI model that they trained earlier. The model was able to generate a very vague but identifiable reconstruction of some of the imagery that the volunteers watched. The paper, by the way, was published in 2011.
Guido Girardi, a former Chilean senator who played an important role in the legislation, compared neurotechnology to something else legislators might have been a little late to respond to—social media. Chile did not want to be late again. Neurotechnology, when it proliferates more widely, might have bigger implications for society than social media. The argument here is that perhaps it’s prudent to get ahead of the technology for once.
