By KIM BELLARD
Over the years, one area of technology and health that I have avoided writing about is brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Partly it was because I thought they were a little creepy, and mostly because I was finding more and more Elon Musk, whose Neuralink He is one of the leaders in the field, even creepier. But an article in The New York Times Magazine by Linda Kinstler Alarm bells went off in my head, and I hope no one is listening.
Your article, Big tech wants direct access to our brains, It does not limit itself to analyzing some of the technological advances in this field, which, without a doubt, are quite impressive. No, what caught my attention was his broader point that it’s time – it’s about time – that we start taking the issue of the privacy of what goes on inside our heads very seriously.
Because we are at the point, or rapidly approaching the point, where those private thoughts of ours are no longer private.
The ostensible purpose of BCIs has generally been to help people with disabilities, such as paralyzed people. Being able to move a cursor or even a limb could change their lives. It might even allow some to talk or even see. They are all excellent use cases, with some track record of success.
BCIs have tended to follow one of two paths. One uses external signals, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG), to try to figure out what your brain is doing. The other, as used by Neuralink, is an implant directly into the brain to detect and interrupt activity. This latter approach has the advantage of giving more specific readings, but has the obvious drawback of requiring surgery and wiring in the brain.
There is a competition hero every four years named cibatlonsponsored by ETH Zurich, which “acts as a platform that challenges teams around the world to develop assistive technologies suitable for everyday use with and for people with disabilities.” TO profile of the same in NYT quoted the runner-up, who uses the external cues method but lost to a team that uses implants: “We weren’t in the same league as the people in Pittsburgh. They play chess and we play checkers.” He is now considering implants.
Good, you say. I can protect my mental privacy by simply not getting implants, right? Not so fast.
TO new role in Scientific advances analyzes progress on “mental subtitles.” That is to say:
We successfully generate descriptive text representing visual content experienced during perception and mental imagery by aligning the semantic features of the text with those linearly decoded from human brain activity… Together, these factors facilitate the direct translation of brain representations into text, resulting in optimally aligned descriptions of the brain’s decoded visual semantic information. These descriptions were well structured and accurately captured the individual components and their interrelationships without using the language network, suggesting the existence of detailed semantic information outside this network. Our method enables intelligible interpretation of internal thoughts, demonstrating the feasibility of brain-to-text communication based on non-verbal thoughts.
The model predicts what a person looks at “in a lot of detail,” says Alex Huth, a computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done related research. “This is hard to do. It’s surprising you can get so much detail.”
“Amazing” is one way to describe it. “Exciting” could be another. For some people, however, the first thing that comes to mind is “scary.”
Mental captioning uses fMRI and AI to perform mental captioning, and participants were fully aware of what was happening. None of the researchers suggest that the technique can tell exactly what people think. “No one has yet shown that you can do that,” says Professor Huth.
It’s that “yet” that worries me.
Dr. Kinstler points out that’s not the only thing we have to worry about: “Advances in optogenetics, a scientific technique that uses light to stimulate or suppress individual genetically modified neurons, could allow scientists to also ‘write’ the brain, potentially altering human understanding and behavior.”
“What’s coming is AI and neurotechnology embedded in our everyday devices,” Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University who studies emerging technologies, told Dr. Kinstler. “Basically, what we’re seeing are direct interactions between the brain and AI. These things are going to be ubiquitous. It could amount to your sense of identity being essentially overwritten.”
Are you worried now?
Dr. Kinstler notes that some countries (not including the US, of course) have passed neural privacy laws. California, Colorado, Montana and Connecticut have passed neural data privacy laws, but the Future of Privacy Forum details how everyone is different and that there isn’t even common agreement on what exactly “neural data” is, let alone how to best safeguard it. As usual, technology is far outpacing regulation.
“While many are concerned about technologies that can ‘mind read’, no such tool currently exists per se and, in many cases, non-neural data can reveal the same information.” writes Jameson Spivack, Deputy Director of Artificial Intelligence at the FPF. “As such, focusing too much on ‘thoughts’ or ‘brain activity’ could exclude some of the most sensitive and intimate personal characteristics that people want to protect. To find the right balance, policymakers should be clear about what potential uses or outcomes they would like to focus on.”
That is, we can’t even define the problem well enough yet.
Dr. Kinstler describes how people have been talking about this issue for literally decades, with little progress on the legislative and regulatory front. Perhaps we are at the point where the debate is no longer academic. Professor Farahany warns that having the ability to control one’s thoughts and feelings “”is a precondition for any other concept of freedom, in the sense that, if the very scaffolding of thought is manipulated, undermined or interfered with, then any other way in which you exercise your freedoms is meaningless, because at that point you are no longer a self-determined human being.”
In the United States of 2025, this does not seem like an idle threat.
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In this digital world, little by little we have been losing our privacy. Aren’t our emails private? Oh, OK. Are Big Tech Tracking Our Purchases? Well, we’ll have better offers. Do social networks extract our data to better manipulate us? Yes, but let’s think about the followers we could gain. Can the surveillance camera track our every movement? But we need it to fight crime!
We complain, but we’ve mostly accepted these (and other) losses of privacy. But when it comes to the possibility of technology reading our thoughts, much less directly manipulating them, we can’t afford to continue dithering.
Kim is a former e-marketing executive at a major Blues scheme, publisher of the late and lamented Tincture.ioand now a regular THCB contributor
