The professor trying to protect our private thoughts from technology | Neuroscience
Pprivate thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings can be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology.
Or at least that is what one of the world’s leading legal ethicists of neuroscience believes.
In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of personal liberty.
Advances in hacking and tracking thoughts, with Orwellian fears of mind control running just below the surface, is the subject of Farahany’s scholarship alongside urgent calls for legislative guarantees to thought privacy, including freedoms from “cognitive fingerprinting”, that lie within an area of ethics broadly termed “cognitive liberty”.
Certainly