Science & Technology, Australia (Commonwealth Union) – The rapid progress in utilizing artificial intelligence for extracting meaningful thoughts from brain waves has raised concerns among human rights and privacy advocates. They argue that the development of this technology is outpacing the legal framework designed to protect individual rights and privacy. This paper aims to fill the gap by examining whether Australia is adequately prepared to address the potential applications of neurotechnologies.
The advancements in neurotechnology have garnered significant attention from human rights scholars, national legislatures, and international organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Council. These developments have sparked intense debates on the need for revising current legal frameworks, both at domestic and international levels, to effectively tackle emerging issues related to human rights and privacy.
However, it is noteworthy that in the Australian context, the discourse surrounding neurotechnology and its implications for human rights remains largely unaddressed. While ethical considerations have been taken into account, there has been a lack of emphasis on human rights law specifically.
A key neurotech law expert Dr. Allan McCay from the Sydney Law School has indicated that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted prior to the onset of neurotechnology, may fail to completely address these technological abilities.
He is urging the placement of neurotechnology on the agenda of legal scholars, law reform bodies, human rights organizations, and in time the parliaments of Australia.
This was detailed in the 1st paper to question our preparedness for the possible use of neurotechnologies and how Australia should tackle human rights issues. Dr McCay authored the paper “Neurotechnology and Human Rights: Developments Overseas and the Challenge for Australia” which appeared in the Australian Journal of Human Rights.
“Given the pace of technological progress, it may be that legislatures should proactively shape the law rather than somewhat passively waiting for the courts to deal with issues.”
Dr McCay indicated that the complete field is under-theorized in Australia and was absent of an answer from regulatory/human rights institutions.
He also stated that as humans carry on going further with machines, it is significant to take into account the downside of delaying the debate surrounding neurotechnology.
The direct monitoring of neural activity gives rise to a variety of concerns, with privacy being the most prominent among them. While we have already relinquished a significant portion of our privacy in the online realm, the prospect of direct access to our neural processes raises even more troubling privacy issues compared to data gathered from our social media behavior, according to researchers of the study.
A recent study conducted at the University of Texas serves as a compelling example. In this study, participants were placed inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner while they listened to podcasts. The data collected during this process was utilized to train a model with the objective of decoding their brain activity.
Once the model was trained, the participants returned to the scanner and listened to a new story—one that had not been used to generate the training data. As they listened, the fMRI scanner recorded the levels of blood oxygenation in various regions of their brains.
Following this the researchers applied a large language model, like OpenAI’s GPT-4 as well as Google, Bard for the matching of patterns in the brain regions to the words and phrases that the participants heard.
To simplify, Dr Shinji Nishimoto, a neuroscientist at Osaka University who was part of the Texas study said, “brain activity is a kind of encrypted signal, and language models provide ways to decipher it”.
The Neurorights Foundation is making a push for companies, governments and the United Nations for the recognition of the rights to mental privacy, personal identity, free will, fair access to mental augmentation as well as protection against bias. “Public debate might be useful to put those who produce neurotechnology on notice that legal change is coming. As realised by several institutions overseas, discussion needs to be had now,” explained Dr McCay.
