Login
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.
As a literary agent, I’m often asked what I look for in a manuscript. Here’s what I tell writers:
I want your book to turn water into full-bodied Merlot.
I want your book to make me hear colors and taste sounds.
I want your book to resurrect the muse of literature, give her a tasteful makeover, then slap her in the face.
Send me a manuscript that feels as powerful as witnessing the birth of my first son.
Think outside the box! Think 50 Shades of Gray but a children’s board book. Think Cujo but written by Jesus Christ.
I’m interested in reading the next big YA novel about a rag-tag crew of misfits on an impossible quest–but set in a dimension where there is no thought or memory. And the sun is a blazing light of unrelenting horror that dissolves the human mind. And the dimension is ruled by a plum-shaped, balding man who reminds me of my father. And at the end of their journey, the crew realizes that the real treasure is the merciful jaws of death.
I want a manuscript that burns bright and hot, cutting down my heating bill by 32 percent.
I crave the sort of get-rich-quick book that shows a guy how to make a quick $2,000 by selling old baseball cards.
I’m burning for a manuscript that will wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me that it loves me.
No chick lit (girl stuff) or bit lit (tech-bro thrillers) or knit lit (textile-themed cozy mysteries).
I’m a sucker for pet detective paranormal erotica. But nothing that’s going to make me blush on the subway.
On the hunt for a manuscript that erases my dark spots and age lines. Bonus if it stops my parents from getting divorced in 1978.
I represent hard Sci-Fi, which means stoic men and aliens and technology in deep space. Not soft Sci-Fi, which is written by mothers. Space is hard and cold, and no one can hear you scream. Women sound ugly when they scream, and spacemen need a break.
Seeking graphic novels without talking animals. Also no talking humans. Ideally: no talking.
Actively seeking diverse voices to tell fresh and compelling stories about white men.
I represent the type of author who will go back in time, kill baby Hitler, garrote baby Hemmingway, then re-write A Farewell to Arms as an upmarket rom-com.
Your book should open my third eye. Ideally, it would also open my first eye, which is swollen shut after that Soft Sci-Fi writer punched me. Now I can’t see, so I’ve been judging manuscripts by mouthfeel. Please send me 1,000 tender, silky pages with an astringent tang.
Send me a horror thriller that will give me nightmares–but not that nightmare with the piano recital, the pizza dough, and the feral pigs.
Send me a book that limns the boundary between poignant beauty and piercing pain, that strokes the gentle loam of the human soul, and that can be made into a 13-movie franchise.
I need a book that gives me the high of MDMA without the risk of faintness, dehydration, or a nosy mall cop telling me to put my shirt back on in the food court.
Please send me a literal bag of gold.
Surprise me! Maybe I don’t know what I’m looking for!
Probably not your book.
***
Rumpus original art by Natalie Peeples
***
Submit your own funny writing to our Rumpus submission manager powered by Submittable. See first our Funny Women Submission Guidelines.
To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.
Over at The Nib, Sam Wallman has created an illustrated history of the Pinkerton Agency — the original "private eyes," a nearly 200-year-old American corporation that essentially pioneered the privatization of domestic military intelligent services, most often weaponized against the working class. — Read the rest
FreshRSS 