The tech industry’s quest to read our minds — and profit from them
Surveillance of biometric data, such as fingerprints or facial scans, used to feel like the most Orwellian of tech frontiers. But the collection of brain data, also known as neural data, may have it beat. The issue is on my brain this week because Neuralink — yet another one of Elon Musk’s tech companies that is marching forward with feverish, at times frightening abandon — just announced that it successfully placed a digital implant into the brain of a real live person.
Devices like this one are being built to help people with Lou Gehrig’s disease and quadriplegia communicate better. If Neuralink’s implant works, and that’s a big if — physicians have voiced concern that it will pose other health risks — it could really help improve people’s lives. But implants are a relatively small subset within a growing industry building neurotech products, most of which are for commercial use. In sectors like mining, trucking and construction, employers have begun using headset-like brainscan devices to help protect workers’ safety, but also to monitor (read: surveil) their productivity. These tools capture plenty of data from our brains. Should we worry about how companies might use that data?
Margot Hanley, an artificial intelligence ethics scholar at Cornell University’s Cornell Tech graduate school, says that we should. In an email exchange this week, she described to me the “unique richness of neural data” and explained how these kinds of devices could glean “sensitive or personal information, from thoughts, feelings and beliefs to health or medical information.” Although Musk may be dominating the headlines around neurotech right now, implants like the one Neuralink just piloted are already regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and data they collect is protected under HIPAA, the federal law that restricts the release of medical information. Hanley is much more concerned about non-invasive commercial devices, which are entirely unregulated in most countries including the U.S.
What kinds of things can we expect these companies to do with brain data? Like most big datasets these days, it will probably be used to make more AI. But it could also be used to market products. It could even be leveraged to convince people to vote a certain way.