Event:

We currently witness converging technological macrotrends with a direct impact on basic and clinical neuroscience and neurotechnology. The gathering of large amounts of personal data (big data), the development of patient- and consumer-directed wearable devices and advances in data analytics with artificial neural networks for deep learning. These developments offer valuable diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities, e.g. identifying disease-specific biomarkers or adaptive, intelligent medical devices, but also create important ethical, legal and social challenges. In the talk, we will focus on the following issues: First, we will discuss the normative implications of an accountability gap that may arise when decision-making capacity is shared between (or transferred to) a patient and an intelligent medical device. We will then examine the issue of privacy and security of personal brain data gathered through large-scale recording of brain activity and its online storage for example from consumer-directed EEG or in neuroimaging repositories. Furthermore, we will also discuss the potential ethical, legal and social impact of advances in Decoding mental states from big brain data and possible ways to safeguard this data from unwarranted access. With respect to emerging neurotechnology, we will analyze the impact of neurotechnological devices, particularly intracranial devices for recording brain activitiy and for closed-loop stimulation, on a person’s sense of agency and personal autonomy. Finallly, we may also have time to discuss the role of public vs. private funding of emerging neurotechnologies and the importance of a user-centered design framework for intelligent medical devices.