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Anticipating ethical implications of DARPA’s neurotechnology push

October 12, 2018 by SharpBrains

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The Pentagon’s Push to Pro­gram Sol­diers’ Brains (The Atlantic):

“…darpa offi­cials refer to the poten­tial con­se­quences of neu­rotech­nol­o­gy by invok­ing the acronym elsi, a term of art devised for the Human Genome Project. It stands for “eth­i­cal, legal, social impli­ca­tions.” The man who led the dis­cus­sion on ethics among the research teams was Steven Hyman, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist and neu­roethi­cist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Insti­tute. Hyman is also a for­mer head of the Nation­al Insti­tute of Men­tal Health. When I spoke with him about his work on darpa pro­grams, he not­ed that one issue need­ing atten­tion is “cross talk.” A man-machine inter­face that does not just “read” someone’s brain but also “writes into” someone’s brain would almost cer­tain­ly cre­ate “cross talk between those cir­cuits which we are tar­get­ing and the cir­cuits which are engaged in what we might call social and moral emo­tions,” he said. It is impos­si­ble to pre­dict the effects of such cross talk on “the con­duct of war” (the exam­ple he gave), much less, of course, on ordi­nary life.

Weber and a darpa spokesper­son relat­ed some of the ques­tions the researchers asked in their ethics dis­cus­sion: Who will decide how this tech­nol­o­gy gets used? Would a supe­ri­or be able to force sub­or­di­nates to use it? Will genet­ic tests be able to deter­mine how respon­sive some­one would be to tar­get­ed neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty train­ing? Would such tests be vol­un­tary or manda­to­ry? Could the results of such tests lead to dis­crim­i­na­tion in school admis­sions or employ­ment? What if the tech­nol­o­gy affects moral or emo­tion­al cognition—our abil­i­ty to tell right from wrong or to con­trol our own behavior?”

News in Context:

  • DARPA invests in non­sur­gi­cal neu­rotech­nolo­gies for even­tu­al use in healthy human subjects
  • Researchers pro­pose four “neu­ror­ights” to har­ness neu­rotech­nol­o­gy for good: cog­ni­tive lib­er­ty, men­tal pri­va­cy, men­tal integri­ty, and psy­cho­log­i­cal continuity
  • DARPA launch­es Tar­get­ed Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty Train­ing pro­gram to accel­er­ate cog­ni­tive skills training
  • 10 neu­rotech­nolo­gies about to trans­form brain enhance­ment and brain health

How will the Clin­i­cians, Patients and Con­sumers of the Future ensure appro­pri­ate use of brain enhance­ment meth­ods encom­pass­ing lifestyle, sup­ple­ments, brain train­ing, med­i­ta­tion, bio/ neu­ro­feed­back, tDCS and more? from Sharp­Brains

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Filed Under: Peak Performance, Technology & Innovation Tagged With: DARPA, ethics, Neuroethics, neuroplasticity, Neurotechnology

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