?Our notion of privacy will be useless?: what happens if technology learns to read our minds? - The Guardian

Oxley is the CEO of Synchron, a neurotechnology company born in Melbourne that has successfully trialled hi-tech brain implants that allow people to send emails and texts purely by thought.

In July this year, it became the first company in the world, ahead of competitors like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, to gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct clinical trials of brain computer interfaces (BCIs) in humans in the US.

Synchron has already successfully fed electrodes into paralysed patients’ brains via their blood vessels. The electrodes record brain activity and feed the data wirelessly to a computer, where it is interpreted and used as a set of commands, allowing the patients to send emails and texts.

BCIs, which allow a person to control a device via a connection between their brain and a computer, are seen as a gamechanger for people with certain disabilities.

BCIs are one of a range of developing technologies centred on the brain. Brain stimulation is another, which delivers targeted electrical pulses to the brain and is used to treat cognitive disorders. Others, like imaging techniques fMRI and EEG, can monitor the brain in real time.

Grant’s concerns about neurotech are not with the work of companies like Synchron. Regulated medical corrections for people with cognitive and sensory handicaps are uncontroversial, in his eyes.

And while it’s a progression that remains hypothetical, it’s not unthinkable. In some countries, governments are already moving to protect humans from the possibility.

In 2017 a young European bioethicist, Marcello Ienca, was anticipating these potential dangers. He proposed a new class of legal rights: neuro rights, the freedom to decide who is allowed to monitor, read or alter your brain.

Today Ienca is a Professor of Bioethics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and advises the European Council, the UN, OECD, and governments on the impact technology could have on our sense of what it means to be human.

Before Ienca proposed the concept of neuro rights, he had already come to believe that the sanctity of our brains needed protection from advancing neurotechnology.

Neuro rights are a positive as well as protective force, Ienca says.

It’s a view Tom Oxley shares. He says stopping the development of BCIs would be an unfair infringement on the rights of the people his company is trying to assist.

Grant believes neuro rights will not be enough to protect our privacy from the potential reach of neurotech outside medicine.

Commercial products such as headsets that claim to improve concentration are already used in Chinese classrooms. Caps that track fatigue in lorry drivers have been used on mine sites in Australia. Devices like these generate data from users’ brain activity. Where and how that data is stored, says Grant, is hard to track and even harder to control.

Grant sees the amount of information that people already share, including neuro data, as an insurmountable challenge for neuro rights.

The consequences of sharing neuro data preoccupies many ethicists.

Chile is not taking any chances on the potential risks of neurotechnology.

In a world first, in September 2021, Chilean law makers approved a constitutional amendment to enshrine mental integrity as a right of all citizens. Bills to regulate neurotechnology, digital platforms and the use of AI are also being worked on in Chile’s senate. Neuro rights principles of the right to cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity, and psychological continuity will be considered.

Europe is also making moves towards neuro rights.

France approved a bioethics law this year that protects the right to mental integrity. Spain is working on a digital rights bill with a section on neuro rights, and the Italian Data Protection Authority is considering whether mental privacy falls under the country’s privacy rights.

Australia is a signatory to the OECD’s non-binding recommendation on responsible innovation in neurotechnology, which was published in 2019.

Hype that over-sells neuro treatments can affect their effectiveness if patients’ expectations are raised too high, he explains. Hype can also cause unwarranted panic.

Carter points out that some of the threats ascribed to future neurotechnology are already present in the way data is used by tech companies every day.

AI and algorithms that read eye movement and detect changes in skin colour and temperature are reading the results of brain activity in controlled studies for advertising. This data has been used by commercial interests for years to analyse, predict and nudge behaviour.

Dystopias that emerge from the data collected without consent aren’t always as boring as Facebook ads.

Oxford’s Stephen Rainey points to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data from 87 million Facebook users was collected without consent. The company built psychological voter profiles based on people’s likes, to inform the political campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

He points out Synchron’s initial funding came from the US military, which was looking to develop robotic arms and legs for injured soldiers, operated through chips implanted in their brains.

Concerns about the misuse of neurotech by rogue actors do not detract from what it is already achieving in the medical sphere.

At the Epworth centre for innovation in mental health at Monash University, deputy director Prof Kate Hoy is overseeing trials of neuro treatments for brain disorders including treatment-resistant depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.

One treatment being tested is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which is already used extensively to treat depression and was listed on the Medicare benefit schedule last year.

One of TMS’s appeals is its non-invasiveness. People can be treated in their lunch hour and go back to work, Hoy says.

TMS is also free of side effects like memory loss and fatigue, common to some brain stimulation methods. Hoy says there is evidence that some patients’ cognition improves after TMS.

When Zia Liddell, 26, began TMS treatment at the Epworth centre about five years ago, she had low expectations. Liddell has trauma-induced schizophrenia and has experienced hallucinations since she was 14.

Liddell goes into hospital for treatment, normally for two weeks, twice a year. There she’ll have two 20-minute sessions of TMS a day, lying in a chair watching TV or listening to music.

It is a quietening of the mind that Liddell says takes effect about the three- to five-day mark of a two-week treatment.

But despite how it has changed her life for the better, she is not naive about the dangers of setting neurotech loose in the world.