The ethics of advanced brain machine interfaces — and why they matter

What, you might ask, have advanced brain machine interfaces got to do with global futures? Quite a lot as it turns out! A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a discussion on the the governance and ethics of brain machine interface technologies in a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Science, Technology and the Law (my comments are at the end of this article). This was a scoping discussion to get a sense of the potential issues here that may need to be addressed moving forward, and was prompted in part by the developments coming out of Elon Musk’s company Neuralink.