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By Marcello Ienca Marcello Ienca, M.Sc., M.A., is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Institute for Biomedical Ethics , University of Basel, Switzerland. His current projects include the assessment of intelligent assistive technologies for people with dementia and other neurocognitive disabilities, the regulation of pervasive neurotechnology, and the neurosecurity of human-machine interfaces. He is the chair of the Student/Postdoc Committee of the International Neuroethics Society and the current coordinator of the Swiss Network for Neuroscience, Ethics and Law. Technology is rapidly reshaping the world we live in. In the past few decades, mankind has not significantly changed biologically, but human societies have undergone continuous and unprecedented developments through technological innovation. Today, most human activities—from messaging to geolocation, from financial transactions to medical therapies— are computer-mediated. In the next decades, the quantity and variet...

By Peter Leistikow  This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris of Summer 2016. Peter Leistikow is an undergraduate student at Emory University studying Neuroscience and Sociology. When he is not doing research in pharmacology, Peter works as a volunteer Advanced EMT in the student-run Emory Emergency Medical Service.  “Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong.” So claimed Chatbot Tay, designed by Microsoft to speak like a teenage girl and to learn from the input of the humans of the Internet (Goodhill 2016). However, Tay’s programming was hijacked by other Twitter users, who encouraged her to repeat various offensive statements . Given that the average teenage girl is not a Nazi apologist, Tay and her creators clearly missed the mark, creating a machine that was neither true to life nor moral. A machine’s ability to inadvertently become immoral was at the back of my mind during the Neuroe...

The Future of the Mind , authored by physicist Dr. Michio Kaku , explores how neuroscience might inform questions that philosophers have been debating for centuries: Do we have a soul? What happens after we die? Do we even have to die? And what would it take to produce a robot with human consciousness or emotions? To explore these questions, Dr. Kaku interviewed hundreds of scientists who are actively conducting ground breaking work in labs around the world, and from these conversations he made predictions on how these scientific findings would shape our future. The work that Dr. Kaku discusses, such as the latest advances in brain-computer-interfaces (BCI) for the disabled , 1 recording dream images with MRI machines , 2 or implanting memories in mice , 3,4 makes for a fascinating and engrossing read from start to finish. The Future of the Mind is at its best when taking readers through these areas of research and explaining the long-term significance, however many of the neurophi...

By Guest Contributor Irina Lucaciu, Emory University   A smile appears on Jack’s face as the robot he is playing with congratulates him for accomplishing a task. Aiden seems captivated by the moving arms of Nao , a robot that has become his new playmate. Thousands of miles away, in London, a copy of Nao sits in the middle of a circle of five boys no more than 10 years old, encouraging them to imitate his movements, touch his hands, and try to identify the feelings he is describing. Nao When asked how the robot makes him feel and why, one of the boys replies that he is happy because the robot feels happy too. However, Nao and the other robots are not simply toys, and neither are Jack, Aiden, and the five British boys simply children at play. They have autism spectrum disorder, and Nao is acting as a treatment tool for improving their life experience and helping them develop socially-relevant skills. Above are described the results of robot-assisted therapy [1, 3, 9, 13]. What is aut...