https://www.nature.com/news/four-ethical-priorities-for-neurotechnologies-and-ai-1.22960
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The Morningside Group comprises neuroscientists, neurotechnologists, clinicians, ethicists and machine-intelligence engineers. It includes representatives from Google and Kernel (a neurotechnology start-up in Los Angeles, California); from international brain projects; and from academic and research institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, China, Japan and Australia. We gathered at a workshop sponsored by the US National Science Foundation at Columbia University, New York, in May 2017 to discuss the ethics of neurotechnologies and machine intelligence.
We believe that existing ethics guidelines are insufficient for this realm2. These include the Declaration of Helsinki, a statement of ethical principles first established in 1964 for medical research involving human subjects (go.nature.com/2z262ag); the Belmont Report, a 1979 statement crafted by the US National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research (go.nature.com/2hrezmb); and the Asilomar artificial intelligence (AI) statement of cautionary principles, published early this year and signed by business leaders and AI researchers, among others (go.nature.com/2ihnqac).
To begin to address this deficit, here we lay out recommendations relating to four areas of concern: privacy and consent; agency and identity; augmentation; and bias. Different nations and people of varying religions, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds will have differing needs and outlooks. As such, governments must create their own deliberative bodies to mediate open debate involving representatives from all sectors of society, and to determine how to translate these guidelines into policy, including specific laws and regulations.
Intelligent investments
Some of the world's wealthiest investors are betting on the interplay between neuroscience and AI. More than a dozen companies worldwide, including Kernel and Elon Musk's start-up firm Neuralink, which launched this year, are investing in the creation of devices that can both 'read' human brain activity and 'write' neural information into the brain. We estimate that current spending on neurotechnology by for-profit industry is already US$100 million per year, and growing fast.
Investment from other sectors is also considerable. Since 2013, more than $500 million in federal funds has gone towards the development of neurotechnology under the US BRAIN initiative alone.
Current capabilities are already impressive. A neuroscientist paralysed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; also known as Lou Gehrig's or motor neuron disease) has used a BCI to run his laboratory, write grant applications and send e-mails3. Meanwhile, researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have shown that three monkeys with electrode implants can operate as a 'brain net' to move an avatar arm collaboratively4. These devices can work across thousands of kilometres if the signal is transmitted wirelessly by the Internet.
Soon such coarse devices, which can stimulate and read the activity of a few dozen neurons at most, will be surpassed. Earlier this year, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a project called Neural Engineering System Design. It aims to win approval from the US Food and Drug Administration within 4 years for a wireless human brain device that can monitor brain activity using 1 million electrodes simultaneously and selectively stimulate up to 100,000 neurons.
Meanwhile, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and numerous start-ups are building ever-more-sophisticated artificial neural networks...
Augmentation. People frequently experience prejudice if their bodies or brains function differently from most10. The pressure to adopt enhancing neurotechnologies, such as those that allow people to radically expand their endurance or sensory or mental capacities, is likely to change societal norms, raise issues of equitable access and generate new forms of discrimination.
Moreover, it's easy to imagine an augmentation arms race. In recent years, we have heard staff at DARPA and the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity discuss plans to provide soldiers and analysts with enhanced mental abilities ('super-intelligent agents'). These would be used for combat settings and to better decipher data streams....
