Machines Like Us S1E3 — The Battle for Your Brain

May 21, 2024

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink successfully installed one of their brain implants in a 29 year old quadriplegic man named Noland Arbaugh. The device changed Arbaugh’s life. He no longer needs a mouth stylus to control his computer or play video games. Instead, he can use his mind.

The brain-computer interface that Arbaugh uses is part of an emerging field known as neurotechnology that promises to reshape the way we live. A wide range of AI empowered neurotechnologies may allow disabled people like Arbaugh to regain independence, or give us the ability to erase traumatic memories in patients suffering from PTSD.

But it doesn’t take great leaps to envision how these technologies could be abused as well. Law enforcement agencies in the United Arab Emirates have used neurotechnology to read the minds of criminal suspects, and convict them based on what they’ve found. And corporations are developing ways to advertise to potential customers in their dreams. Remarkably, both of these things appear to be legal, as there are virtually no laws explicitly governing neurotechnology.

All of which makes Nita Farahany’s work incredibly timely. Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

Farahany isn’t fatalistic about neurotech – in fact, she uses some of it herself. But she is adamant that we need to start developing laws and guardrails as soon as possible, because it may not be long before governments, employers and corporations have access to our brains.