Rights for Neurons? By Brian Simpson

I am not comfortable with this one, but on the surface it makes sense. With advances in neuro technology, to the level of recording and changing neurons and rewriting the human mind, some are proposing that there be a set of neuron rights to protest rights to freewill and privacy. As I see it, these technologies will be intrinsically evasive and oppressive and no code of ethics will control the evils that they will unleash.

Almost always nowadays, the evils of technocratic advances outweigh any benefits to the ordinary people. For the Dark Lords, though, this is great stuff and they cannot fund the cognitive AI freaks enough.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-tech-rights-idUSKBN28D3HK?utm_source=gnaa

“Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday.

A set of “neuro-rights” should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York’s Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards.

Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies - rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says.

“If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people,” Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference.

“This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully.”

Neurotechnology has the potential to alter the mechanisms that make people human, so putting it in a “human rights framework” is appropriate, he added.

The U.N.’s declaration, which laid the groundwork for international human rights, was adopted after World War II in 1948.

A need for neuro-rights will grow as the developments become more popular and commercialized, the neurologists said.

Many of these technologies so far have applications in medicine, such as brain-computer interfaces helping patients move prosthetic limbs or communicate after a brain injury.

But those neurotechnologies increasingly will be available outside of the medical context, said John Krakauer, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

“Deep down what people want is consumer technologies,” he said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved deep brain stimulation procedures - implanting electrodes in the brain - to treat a range of disorders from Parkinson’s disease to epilepsy.”