The Magna Cortica: A bill of rights for our future,
implant-enhanced brains
By John Hewitt on May 14, 2014 at 12:30 pm
In 1215 the feudal barons in England imposed the Magna
Carta upon King John. The document was designed not only to proclaim their
liberties and protect their rights, but to constrain the seemingly unlimited
scope of the King’s will. In a nod to the prescience of the Magna Carta and
social expediency it spawned, a group of neurally-inclined futurists have begun
to draft a similar constitution for our time. This new “Magna Cortica” has set
for itself the task of defining a set of rights and restrictions to preempt
potential abuses in the rapidly growing field of cognitive enhancement.
The Magna Cortica
1. The right to self-knowledge
2. The right to self-modification
3. The right to refuse modification
4. The right to modify/refuse to modify your children
5. The right to know who has been modified
The five points of the Magna Cortica, drawn up by Jamais
Cascio of The Institute for the Future, may remind some of Issac Asimov’s
famous Laws of Robotics. The Cortica represents an excellent starting point.
The rights to self knowledge, and to seek or to refuse self modification,
appear somewhat obvious but provide the necessary foundation. The fourth point,
the right to modify or refuse the same for our children, would increasingly
loom in direct contradiction to the previous points as any child matured, but
similarly lays the groundwork for where we might later set this bar. (Read: US
military begins research into moral, ethical robots, to stave off Skynet-like
apocalypse.)
I, Robot - killer robot
The proposed right to know who has been modified seems to
be the one that may need further refinement. Clearly patrons would like to be
assured that their tour bus driver is still capable of achieving sufficient REM
sleep, but what one does at age, and independent of external effect, should
ideally remain within the province of self. The problem with full public
disclosure of who has been modded with what is not so much it’s futility, but
rather — as we have seen in digital rights management — it is the greater
injustice wrought through any attempt to enforce it. The right to know what
others might have done to their brains, essentially their medical history,
presently stands in direct contradiction to the social behemoth we might
affectionately call the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act) monster. That barely even knocks upon the door of other possible ethical
incongruency.
The right to reasonable free speech, for example, does
not exist independent from context. What we might speak (or type) can not be
extricated from who it is spoken to, when and where it is spoken, and in our
progressive times, by who speaks it. Might we therefore expect any more or less
right to its complement, the right to non-disclosure? In other words the right
not to speak and to maintain privacy? As we maintained in a recent post on stem
cells, ethics does not just involve contradictions, it is the science of them.
The best we can offer for now is to do exactly what we are doing: propose
ideals on a public forum and let them compete for our minds as the hardware
concerning them is realized and becomes commonplace.
Magna Cortica in that spirit we have asked for additional
comment from Ayden Jacob the President of The Academy of Medical Ethics in
Bio-Innovation. AMEBI has been grappling with the balance between increasing
human capabilities while remaining within the bioethical zone of acceptable
enhancements. With regards to the Magna Cortica, Ayden had this to say:
“It is with fervor and zeal that scientists, and society
as whole, approaches this new horizon of innovation in the brain. We long to
enhance our cognitive abilities at all costs, even when pharmacologic
intervention may hinder us with unpleasant side effects. Philosophically
speaking, man is made to develop into the greatest Man we can become.
Scientifically speaking, man can become the most influential and powerful Man
when technology and physiology are linked together within the human brain. As
we aim to increase our cognitive abilities, whether that be to think smarter,
faster, quicker or longer, it will be important to allow science to explore
various opportunities at enhancing the brain’s lurking power. And to accomplish
such a goal, many may feel we are tainting Nature. This is the debate. But it
is only right that we give science the room, freedom, and ability to push us to
the next level of human capabilities.”
There are significant concerns beyond the inter-citizen
familiarity issues we have described. In particular, the very real problem of
discordance between patient and device/implant maker needs to be dealt with. An
example is the trouble one test subject had with his deep brain stimulation
device in a trial conducted by St. Jude Medical in cooperation with Stanford.
The video below serves as a cautionary warning to some of the issues that can
arise with any transformative neurotechnology: Namely, if your brain’s
functionality is significantly altered by a device, do you still own your brain
and the work that it does?
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