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Written by David Lyreskog
‘Hivemind Brain-Computer Interfaces’, as imagined by the AI art generator Midjourney
A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing, and hybrid and artificial intelligence, promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks. With implementations ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications, as these tools continue to improve, we need to anticipate and monitor their impacts – how they may affect our society, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other concepts which ground our moral landscapes.
In a new paper, I, together with Dr. Hazem Zohny, Prof. Julian Savulescu, and Prof. Ilina Singh, show how these new technologies may reshape fundamental components of widely accepted concepts pertaining to moral behaviour. The paper, titled ‘Merging Minds: The Conceptual and Ethical Impacts of Emerging Technologies for Collective Minds’, was just published in Neuroethics, and is freely available as an Open Access article through the link above.
In the paper, we argue that the received views on how we (should) ascribe responsibility to individuals and collectives map poorly onto networks of these ‘Collective Minds’. The intimately collective nature of direct multiple-brain interfaces, for instance, where human minds can collaborate on and complete complex tasks without necessarily being in the same room – or even on the same continent! – seem to suggest a collectivist moral framework to ascribe agency and responsibility. However, the technologies we are seeing in R&D do not necessitate the meeting of criteria we normally would turn to for ascription of such frameworks; they do not, for instance, seem to rely on that participants have shared goals, know what the goals of other participants are, or even know whether they are collaborating with another person or a computer.
In anticipating and assessing the ethical impacts of Collective Minds, we propose that we move beyond binary approaches to thinking about agency and responsibility (i.e. that they are either individual or collective), and that relevant frameworks for now focus on other aspects of significance to ethical analysis, such as (a) technical specifications of the Collective Mind, (b) the domain in which the technology is deployed, and (c) the reversibility of its physical and mental impacts. However, in the future, we will arguably need to find other ways to assess agency constellations and responsibility distribution, lest we abandon these concepts completely in this domain.
Enlarge / Pager, a 9-year-old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink. (credit: YouTube/NeuraLink)
The US Department of Transportation is investigating allegations that Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, violated federal transportation regulations when it shipped contaminated implants removed from the brains of deceased research monkeys infected with multiple types of dangerous pathogens. The alleged violations could have put humans at risk of exposure to hazardous germs, including drug-resistant bacteria and a potentially life-threatening herpes virus.
Reuters was the first to report the department's investigation, which was sparked by allegations brought Thursday by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a medical group that advocates for animal welfare in medical research. The Department of Transportation confirmed to Ars on Friday that it has opened a standard investigation of Neuralink in response to PCRM's allegations.
In a letter addressed to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and William Schoonover, associate administrator of the department's Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, the PCRM laid out its evidence for possible violations of hazardous material transportation regulations based on a trove of documents and emails obtained through public record requests. The advocacy group says the evidence shows Neuralink's contaminated hardware was not properly packaged to prevent exposure to humans and that Neuralink employees who transported the material had failed to undergo legally required training on how to safely transport such material.
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