“Ways of Knowing” Episode 8: Ethics of Technology

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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]

 

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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 — things that might one day be able to restore the use of a person’s arms or legs, and can even now allow a person to control a robotic arm just using their thoughts. They’re called brain-computer interfaces.

 

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Sara Goering: And they are about the size of a dime, maybe? Pretty small. They get implanted usually on the surface of somebody’s brain.

 

CH: Sara Goering, professor of philosophy at the University of Washington. 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 –– often those who have experienced strokes or are paralyzed –– 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 can’t use their arms or legs learn to use robotic substitutes.

 

SG: BCI devices are things that are on or in the brain, and they’re reading neural activity, and then they’re using it to control something outside the body. So it’s a kind of reading out of the brain.

 

CH: Imagine squeezing your fist. When you have that thought, there’s 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: It’s a totally new way of interacting with the world because you’re not using your own musculature to use something, you’re using your brain and your concentration to control the robotic arm.

 

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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 you’ve 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. 

 

The ethical questions that brian computer computer interfaces bring up are also enormous — 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 we’re developing these devices that offer mediation on that agency. And not one that’s 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.

 

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[sound of a group of people all talking at once]

 

CH: If I’m at a bar and I hit somebody in the face with my own hand, it’s pretty clear that I’m responsible for that. I am in control of my arm and hand. I have agency over my own body. But let’s 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 I’m controlling with a computer chip inside my head. Who’s to say whether I actually intended to hit him, or if something instead simply malfunctioned? The robotic arm isn’t even a part of my body — it’s physically detached from me. How responsible do I feel now? 

 

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. They’re moving it, they’re responsible for it when it’s successful. And then when it’s not successful, they’re 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 don’t like.

 

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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, we’re 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 I’m going to share them. 

 

CH: With computer chips implanted in our brains, that could become increasingly more difficult. For Sara, it’s essential that the researchers and companies building BCIs ensure that the privacy of the person using it is incorruptible — that it’s impossible for anybody who doesn’t have permission to access their thoughts.  

 

SG: We’re 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 haven’t even expressed, or the neural processing that you’re doing that’s running in the background that you haven’t 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 someone’s head, the danger of them being abused is obvious. And that’s to say nothing of more pragmatic things. Like what happens if there’s a bug in the technology, or something malfunctions?

 

SG: Also let’s 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 — there’s scarring around them that doesn’t 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, it’s not profitable and so it goes under.

 

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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 there’s some good to be done from thinking about that very abstractly, as a philosopher or an STS person or something. But I think there’s 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 it’s like in practice. We can shape the way it goes by being part of that.

 

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CH: To treat any new technology or innovation as an example of progress is clearly flawed. Brain-computer interfaces aren’t 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.

 

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CH: Here’s five texts that’ll help you learn more about technology and ethics as a way of knowing.

 

“The Battle for Your Brain,” by Nita Farahany

 

CH: A book that navigates the complex legal and ethical dilemmas posed by modern neurotechnology.

 

“Bionic Pioneers,” 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.

“Policy, Identity, and Neurotechnology,” edited by Veljko Dubljević and Allen Coin

 

CH: A volume that looks at the past, present and future of brain-computer interfaces 

 

“What is it like to use a BCI? – insights from an interview study with brain-computer interface users”

 

CH: A paper that explores the social and ethical implications of BCIs

 

“Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency”

 

An essay that treats the philosophical and legal ramifications of BCIs on our conceptions of agency and what it means for a human to “act.”

 

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 University of Washington and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with UW 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.

 

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