Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, can help people with severe injuries or impairments regain the ability to communicate or move their arms and legs through robotic substitutes. The devices, which are about the size of a dime and are implanted on the surface of a personâs brain, serve as a communication link between the brainâs neural activity and an external device, such as a computer or a robotic limb.
Ways of Knowing
The World According to Sound
Season 2, Episode 8
The Ethics of Technology
[sound of car starting]
Chris Hoff: About one in 50 Americans has some form of paralysis. Most of these cases come from spinal cord injuries, which most frequently happen in car accidents.
[sound of car horns]
[instrumental music plays]
CH: Paralysis can mean anything from total loss of body control to the loss of the function of specific limbs. But there are emerging technologies offering hope â things that might one day be able to restore the use of a personâs arms or legs, and can even now allow a person to control a robotic arm just using their thoughts. Theyâre called brain-computer interfaces.
[instrumental music plays]
Sara Goering: And they are about the size of a dime, maybe? Pretty small. They get implanted usually on the surface of somebodyâs brain.
CH: Sara Goering, professor of philosophy at the 91±ŹÁÏ. She specializes in disability and bioethics.
SG: That requires a surgery, right? It requires a burr hole in the skull to get access to the surface of the brain. And from there it can read the electrical activity that is going on in a certain cortical region.
CH: People with severe injuries or impairments ââ often those who have experienced strokes or are paralyzed ââ can benefit the most from these brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. BCIs can help people who have lost the ability to speak, communicate again or those who canât use their arms or legs learn to use robotic substitutes.
SG: BCI devices are things that are on or in the brain, and theyâre reading neural activity, and then theyâre using it to control something outside the body. So itâs a kind of reading out of the brain.
CH: Imagine squeezing your fist. When you have that thought, thereâs a certain pattern of brain activity that occurs. BCIs can capture that pattern, and translate it into action. So if you have a robotic arm hooked up to a BCI, by merely imagining the phenomenon of squeezing your fist, you can make the robotic arm do just that.
SG: Itâs a totally new way of interacting with the world because youâre not using your own musculature to use something, youâre using your brain and your concentration to control the robotic arm.
[instrumental music plays]
CH: The potential benefits of brain-computer interfaces to medical science are enormous. People who are completely or partially paralyzed could one day regain the use of their affected limbs, allowing them to walk again. If you have a neurodegenerative disease like ALS and youâve lost your faculties of speech, BCIs can help. By merely thinking of the words, a BCI can be trained to decode them and then express those words with a computer generated voice.Â
The ethical questions that brian computer computer interfaces bring up are also enormous â and they center around concepts of agency.
SG: These questions of agential responsibility are really deeply bound up with our sense of agency in the world and now weâre developing these devices that offer mediation on that agency. And not one thatâs visible to us in the same way that cell phones or other things are. It becomes an embodied part of how we are in the world.
[instrumental music ends]
[sound of a group of people all talking at once]
CH: If Iâm at a bar and I hit somebody in the face with my own hand, itâs pretty clear that Iâm responsible for that. I am in control of my arm and hand. I have agency over my own body. But letâs say I got into an accident and I lost the use of my arms. So instead, I hit somebody in the face with a robotic arm that Iâm controlling with a computer chip inside my head. Whoâs to say whether I actually intended to hit him, or if something instead simply malfunctioned? The robotic arm isnât even a part of my body â itâs physically detached from me. How responsible do I feel now?Â
SG: People really quickly, we might say, incorporate that sense. It becomes part of them, so they think of themselves as having the robotic arm as part of them. Theyâre moving it, theyâre responsible for it when itâs successful. And then when itâs not successful, theyâre less inclined to take responsibility for that.
CH: In other words, I take responsibility when my robotic arm does something I like, but am less quick to do so when it does something I donât like.
[instrumental music plays]
CH: Controlling a robotic arm or leg with your thoughts is one thing. Having a computer read those thoughts, and potentially share them with other people, is something else.
SG: When we think about a sense of agency, weâre often thinking about how we enact intentions in the world and how we move our bodies. I think part of what it is to be an agent is to have internal private space. And that becomes a much more publicly accessible thing when we have such devices. But generally, the things in my head, I decide when Iâm going to share them.Â
CH: With computer chips implanted in our brains, that could become increasingly more difficult. For Sara, itâs essential that the researchers and companies building BCIs ensure that the privacy of the person using it is incorruptible â that itâs impossible for anybody who doesnât have permission to access their thoughts. Â
SG: Weâre all online, we put our banking, our social media, intimate thoughts we share. Those things are corruptible, hackable and then stuff we thought was private to us is shared. But if the thoughts that you havenât even expressed, or the neural processing that youâre doing thatâs running in the background that you havenât even expressed in any way, that seems really worrisome. But then, if anybody can hack into that, right? Suddenly the movements that you are taking yourself to be making could be hackable. That seems horrifying to me.
CH: With corporate-owned computer chips implanted in someoneâs head, the danger of them being abused is obvious. And thatâs to say nothing of more pragmatic things. Like what happens if thereâs a bug in the technology, or something malfunctions?
SG: Also letâs think, you have hardware put in your head that takes a surgery to get it there, takes a surgery to get it out of there. And hardware goes bad, leads go bad, electrodes â thereâs scarring around them that doesnât work anymore. And then what happens if the company goes under? There are lots of cases out there of people who are getting good benefits and the company, itâs not profitable and so it goes under.
[instrumental music plays]
SG: These are technologies that are really cool and exciting but can fundamentally alter the way we are in the world, and we should be thinking really carefully about those and what it means. I think thereâs some good to be done from thinking about that very abstractly, as a philosopher or an STS person or something. But I think thereâs a lot of value in really being on the ground with people who are developing them and the early users of them to understand what itâs like in practice. We can shape the way it goes by being part of that.
[instrumental music plays]
CH: To treat any new technology or innovation as an example of progress is clearly flawed. Brain-computer interfaces arenât de facto good. Some aspects of them are extremely beneficial, others seem potentially nightmarish. The ethics of technology aims to uncover all the possible consequences of a new tech on human beings and society, and above all, to protect against the misuse of technology.
[instrumental music plays]
CH: Hereâs five texts thatâll help you learn more about technology and ethics as a way of knowing.
âThe Battle for Your Brain,â by Nita Farahany
CH: A book that navigates the complex legal and ethical dilemmas posed by modern neurotechnology.
âBionic Pioneers,â by Jennifer French and James Cavuoto
CH: This tells the stories of 10 people with neurological disabilities who made the decision to use a neurotech device to treat their condition.
âPolicy, Identity, and Neurotechnology,â edited by Veljko DubljeviÄ and Allen Coin
CH: A volume that looks at the past, present and future of brain-computer interfacesÂ
âWhat is it like to use a BCI? â insights from an interview study with brain-computer interface usersâ
CH: A paper that explores the social and ethical implications of BCIs
âDoing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agencyâ
An essay that treats the philosophical and legal ramifications of BCIs on our conceptions of agency and what it means for a human to âact.â
CREDITS
Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91±ŹÁÏ and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with 91±ŹÁÏ faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, Human Gazpacho, Graffiti Mechanism, Serge Quadrado, Bio Unit, and our friends, Matmos.
The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.
END
In this episode, , a 91±ŹÁÏ professor of philosophy, discusses the ethical concerns surrounding BCIs â from questions of agency to hackability to medical and technical issues. While the benefits of BCIs are enormous, Goering says itâs also important to carefully consider the ways they are fundamentally altering the way we see the world.
This is the eighth episode of Season 2 of âWays of Knowing,â a podcast highlighting how studies of the humanities can reflect everyday life. Through a partnership between The World According to Sound and the 91±ŹÁÏ, each episode features a faculty member from the 91±ŹÁÏ College of Arts & Sciences, the work that inspires them, and suggested resources for learning more about the topic.