Howard A. Doughty
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand how functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures brain activity. It does so by detecting changes associated in cerebral blood flow that are associated with neuronal activation and energy used by specific brain cells.
Rocket science probably wouldn’t help at all. It is about defying the law of gravity and breaking free of Earth’s pull. It’s pretty simple stuff, just plain physics, involving mainly engineering machines to figure out how to make stuff go up in the air really fast and to send that stuff into orbit or off to the Moon, Mars, or into the far reaches of the Milky Way. It doesn’t involve philosophically fraught, politically controversial, and biologically complex questions of mechanically messing with the human mind.
Mind-machine “interfaces” — involving their potential capacity to read our minds and maybe one day to insert thoughts into our minds (brainwashing without the torture) — are much trickier and more ethically problematic. They relate to Descartes’ distinction between “mind” (immaterial) and “body” (material) — the so-called mind/body dichotomy. They prompt serious thought about “thought,” questions about “consciousness,” and, for some, put ideas of “free will” and a “soul” in jeopardy. It’s important to acknowledge those issues. But the imminent problems of individual and social control may be more urgent.
Practically speaking, the fMRI measures brain activity connected to blood flow. As Scientific American’s Allison Parshall recently put it: “It isn’t a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can’t look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner.” Rather, when combined with a monitor that makes an artificial intelligence language “decoder,” a person can mentally imagine a narrative and the AI decoder “can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person… imagined telling in the scanner.”
The prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience adds that the hybrid technology “generates intelligible word sequences that recover the meaning of perceived speech, imagined speech and even silent videos, demonstrating that a single decoder can be applied to a range of tasks.” Researchers “tested the decoder acress cortex and found that continuous language can be separately decoded from multiple regions.” Moreover, since the experiments showed that “subject cooperation is necessary… both to train and to apply the decoder,” concerns about invasion of privacy or “mind control” are at least temporarily assuaged.
The good? Most obviously, people who have lost the ability to speak, perhaps because of suffering a stroke, might be able to communicate more effectively. What’s more, the fMRI/AI hybrid is non-invasive and medically risk-free compared to such previous efforts as the implantation of medical devices (notably computer chips) physically into the brain.
The bad? Most dramatically, concerns can be raised about a looming artificial landscape in which surveillance is not limited to retinal scans, global positioning systems, credit cards which report every financial interaction, and “smart” homes and automobiles that monitor your every action. In such a world, already outlined in dystopian science fiction novels, short stories, and films, corporate authorities — public and private — can and will spy or take note of every thought and record every action of humanity. They will make Orwell’s “Big Brother” seem like no more than an annoying “peeping Tom.” Or so we are led to believe.
The ugly? The underlying concern most worth reflection is the privileging of technology over humanity — even (or especially) when the best of the innovators may sincerely believe that the “transhuman condition” will ultimately salvage our species and the world that we are relentlessly damaging.
What is to be done? It remains for those outside the scientific-technological-corporate-government “community” to remain attentive. Jerry Tang, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, explains: “I think that while this technology is in its infancy, it’s very important to regulate what brain data can and cannot be used for. And then if one day it does become possible to gain accurate decoding without getting the person’s cooperation, we’ll have a regulatory foundation in place that we can build off.”
That may be the least we can do.
Certainly, Big Brotherism is a possible consequence of mind-controlling technology. Sociologists must love Sir Isaac Newton, when they declare, “For every social action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Let’s not rule out that, when bad things happen, people will organize resistance.
“It is about defying the law of gravity” – not so. Gravity is “still in effect” everywhere.
As for the subject proper: one thing to think about is what is possible in the way of “non-intrusive” brain “reading”. It is unlikely to me that anything will ever be invented that will be able to do “at a distance” (e.g., by emissions, like your skull was being recorded TEMPEST style). Of course, with the current “it is cool so I want it”, people may yet volunteer to have implants, wearables, etc. for dubious (to me at least) reasons, in addition to the benefits to the paralyzed, etc.
Like with many things I do wonder about the security in addition to the privacy; right now there is a problem with people using BlueTooth hearing aids. If they are paired with a malicious device they can sometimes be tuned in such a way that the wearer will suffer the loss of their remaining hearing. It is for this reason, in part (there are many other good reasons to do this anyway, but this makes it particularly harrowing to think about), I would encourage employers to approvelist Bluetooth devices on their corporate networks and so on. Imagine what it would be like to have a Bluetooth implant to assist, say, in walking, getting compromised: the injuries could be quite real in addition to the serious regression in the patient’s condition.
If you are wondering why such things need Bluetooth, this is a convenience that is part of modern hearing assistance. It allows the user to make adjustments and so on to their own equipment without having to visit the clinic and avoids the expense of a custom protocol and hardware.