Ethical considerations




Sources:

User-centric issuesedit

  • Long-term effects to the user remain largely unknown.
  • Obtaining informed consent from people who have difficulty communicating.
  • The consequences of BCI technology for the quality of life of patients and their families.
  • Health-related side-effects (e.g. neurofeedback of sensorimotor rhythm training is reported to affect sleep quality).
  • Therapeutic applications and their potential misuse.
  • Safety risks
  • Non-convertibility of some of the changes made to the brain

Legal and socialedit

  • Issues of accountability and responsibility: claims that the influence of BCIs overrides free will and control over sensory-motor actions, claims that cognitive intention was inaccurately translated due to a BCI malfunction.
  • Personality changes involved caused by deep-brain stimulation.
  • Concerns regarding the state of becoming a "cyborg" - having parts of the body that are living and parts that are mechanical.
  • Questions personality: what does it mean to be a human?
  • Blurring of the division between human and machine and inability to distinguish between human vs. machine-controlled actions.
  • Use of the technology in advanced interrogation techniques by governmental authorities.
  • Selective enhancement and social stratification.
  • Questions of research ethics that arise when progressing from animal experimentation to application in human subjects.
  • Moral questions
  • Mind reading and privacy.
  • Tracking and "tagging system"
  • Mind control.
  • Movement control
  • Emotion control

In their current form, most BCIs are far removed from the ethical issues considered above. They are actually similar to corrective therapies in function. Clausen stated in 2009 that "BCIs pose ethical challenges, but these are conceptually similar to those that bioethicists have addressed for other realms of therapy". Moreover, he suggests that bioethics is well-prepared to deal with the issues that arise with BCI technologies. Haselager and colleagues pointed out that expectations of BCI efficacy and value play a great role in ethical analysis and the way BCI scientists should approach media. Furthermore, standard protocols can be implemented to ensure ethically sound informed-consent procedures with locked-in patients.

The case of BCIs today has parallels in medicine, as will its evolution. Similar to how pharmaceutical science began as a balance for impairments and is now used to increase focus and reduce need for sleep, BCIs will likely transform gradually from therapies to enhancements. Efforts are made inside the BCI community to create consensus on ethical guidelines for BCI research, development and dissemination.

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