J. Hughes- Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

- Trinity College

Ethical Challenges of Emulating Human Brains

Neuroethics and the Human Brain Project – March 24-25, 2014 – Brocher Foundation, Hermance, Switzerland

Acceleration & Convergence• Churchland: Five-ten year window? (if eventually

as impactful as invention of literacy?)

• Markram: Exponential growth in scientific knowledge with no plan for exploitation and translation

• Illumination of contemporary precursor policy issues (Harris) Path dependency (Rose)

• Unpredictable breakthroughs:

– In silico testing of drugs and nano/pharmaceutical hybrids

– Neural code translation to phenomenal experience

– Brain-machine and nano-neural interfaces

– Brain prostheses

– (Materialism assumed) Hard AI and full emulation

• Scientists little better than futurists at tech prediction

• Disciplinary silos • Traffic illusion

• Bio-application often precedes theoretical understanding

• Progress is at least iterative between practice and theory

Neural Dust

• (UC Berkeley) Neural Dust: An Ultrasonic, Low Power Solution for Chronic Brain-Machine Interfaces (July 2013)

Exponential Progress•

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Cognitive Enhancement

• The burden of the normal brain

• Improved learning, memory

• Enhancement of senses

• Control of mood

• Moral enhancement: self-control, empathy, prudence, fairness

• Brain-to-brain communication

Brain Enhancers

Internal

External

Hardware Software

Status Quo Bias• (Changeaux) Ensure universal access to

enablement, but…

• No fundamental difference between therapy and enhancement

Cognitive Liberty• All extrapolations of current and

long-standing issues

• Brain privacy and the prediction of criminality

• Moral enhancement and criminal rehabilitation (psychiatric treatment, testosterone suppression)

• Brain-machine IP and self-determination

• Neuro-marketing, psy ops, thought control

Building Skills • (Thagard) Adding new adaptive

learning capabilities into artificial intelligence

– Affective computing

– Social cognition

– Syntax and semantics

• (Thagard) Accelerating technological unemployment of jobs requiring “human” skills

• Acceleration of concentration of wealth in the hands of the owners of capital

Frey and Osborne, 2013

Possibility Space of Machine Minds• Our assumptions about the

possible permutations of minds are inescapably anthropocentric

• The bottom-up approaches to AGI vs. brain emulation

• Disaggregation of mammalian architecture

– Embodiment

– Cognition,

– Desire, will, intention

– Sentience, self-awareness, identity

Attempts to simulate human mental states will likely create many novel states by accident

Substrate-Independent Moral Status

• A creature has moral status depending on its morally relevant phenomenological and behavioral attributes regardless of the substrate on which it is instantiated

Building Sentience

• Suffering caused to animals in the building of brain simulations

• The hard problem: phenomenal qualia

• Metzinger’s warning

• Dennett & Sandberg: E.M. deconstruction of pain, suffering

Building Self-Awareness, Personhood

• Difficulty of defining (Schermer) and determining when it is really accomplished (Searle, zombies)

• Rights of persons:

– Right to life, euthanasia (Is the death/storage/re-editing of an emulation meaningful?)

– Well-being, meaningful existence, communication

– Autonomy, self-ownership, privacy

– (Silicon Valley obsession) Property, making contracts

How would we research persistent vegetative states, dementia, schizophrenia, aphasia, without simulating them?

Building Embodiment and Sensory Input

• Whole Brain Emulation (Bostrom & Sandberg, 2008)

• Simulated environments preferable to “real” inputs

A Right to Authentic Experience?

• Of course, desire for authentic experience is not a given

• We may be discover the authenticity switch (Kraemer)

• What is authentic experience? Aren’t we all living in our own experience machines?

Building Personal Identity• Consciousness may be possible without

personal identity (Buddhist psychology)

• We already navigate the Illusion of self vs legal fiction (parallel to free will vs culpability): Multiple personality, dementia and advanced directives, etc.

• But neurotech will increasingly challenge illusion of bounded, continuous self

• Prosthetic flexibillity (Blanke) Prosthetic erosion/enhancement of identity, authenticity (Kraemer, Schermer)

• Memory modification

• Copies

• Shared experience, memory, identity

Brain Damage, Death & Repair

• Detecting survival of and predicting recovery of personal identity

• Which parts and how much of the memory of self would be necessary to have a subjective sense of identity, given that 99% of morphology can be predicted from pan-human morphology? (Markram)

Terry Schiavo’s brain scan

Building Self-Will• Can there be personhood

without self-will?

• Buddhist psychology: desire is the driver of self-concept; desires catalyze self-concept

• Ergo ethical grounds for avoiding self-willed emulations/machines

• Prophylactic preparation for controlling self-willed machines

Building Morality, Character

• Autonomous military robotics

• Emulations with moral imperatives could be moral monsters

• True emulation of moral sentiment and reasoning will require developmental approach to character (Wallach)

Final Thoughts

• Defense of speculative, anticipatory ethical reflection

• Challenge to status quo bias re enhancement

• Centrality of concept of cognitive liberty

• Illumination of possibility space of minds

• Substrate independent moral status

• Problematization of illusion of self

For more information• Institute for Ethics

and Emerging Technologiesieet.org

• Me: director@ieet.org