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By Yunmiao Wang Miao is a second year graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at Emory University. She has watched Black Mirror since it first came out, and has always been interested in the topics of Neuroethics.  Humans in the 21st century have an intimate relationship with technology. Much of our lives are spent being informed and entertained by screens. Technological advancements in science and medicine have helped and healed in ways we previously couldn’t dream of. But what unanticipated consequences may be lurking behind our rapid expansion into new technological territory? This question is continually being explored in the British sci-fi TV series  Black Mirror , which provides a glimpse into the not-so-distant future and warns us to be mindful of how we treat our technology and how it can affect us in return. This piece is the final installment of a series of posts that discuss ethical issues surrounding neuro-technologies featured in the show, and will compare h...

By Katie L. Strong, PhD  In a quiet room in a London office building, artificial intelligence history was made last October as reigning European Champion Fan Hui played Go , a strategy-based game he had played countless times before. This particular match was different from the others though – not only was Fan Hui losing, but he was losing against a machine. The machine was a novel artificial intelligence system named AlphaGo developed by Google DeepMind . DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 for an alleged $617 million (their largest European acquisition to date), is a company focused on developing machines that are capable of learning new tasks for themselves. DeepMind is more interested in artificial “general” intelligence, or AI machines that are adaptive to the task at hand and can accomplish new goals with little or no preprogramming. DeepMind programs essentially have a kind of short-term working memory that allows them to manipulate and adapt information to ma...