When technology can read minds, how will we protect our privacy? | Nita Farahany

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2018

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Tech that can decode your brain activity and reveal what you're thinking and feeling is on the horizon, says legal scholar and ethicist Nita Farahany. What will it mean for our already violated sense of privacy? In a cautionary talk, Farahany warns of a society where people are arrested for merely thinking about committing a crime (like in "Minority Report") and private interests sell our brain data -- and makes the case for a right to cognitive liberty that protects our freedom of thought and self-determination.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features Professor, Lawyer, and author Nita A. Farahani, recorded live at TED Salon, the next wave 2018.
0:11.5	In the months following the 2009 presidential election in Iran, protests erupted across the country.
0:26.6	The Iranian government violently suppressed what came to be known as the Iranian Green Movement,
0:32.6	even blocking mobile signals to cut off communication between the protesters. My parents, who emigrated to the United States in the late 1960s,
0:37.9	spent substantial time there where all of my large extended family live.
0:43.8	When I would call my family in Tehran
0:46.9	during some of the most violent crackdown of the protest,
0:50.5	none of them dared discuss with me what was happening.
0:54.5	They or I knew to quickly steer the conversation to other topics.
0:58.4	All of us understood what the consequences could be of a perceived dissident action.
1:04.9	But I still wish I could have known what they were thinking or what they were feeling.
1:11.4	What if I could have?
1:13.3	Or more frighteningly, what if the Iranian government could have?
1:17.9	Would they have arrested them based on what their brains revealed?
1:22.1	That day may be closer than you think.
1:25.7	With our growing capabilities in neuroscience,
1:28.3	artificial intelligence and machine learning,
1:31.3	we may soon know a lot more of what's happening in the human brain.
1:36.3	As a bioethicist, a lawyer, a philosopher, and an Iranian-American,
1:41.3	I'm deeply concerned about what this means for our freedoms and what kinds of
1:46.0	protections we need.
1:48.0	I believe we need a right to cognitive liberty as a human right that needs to be protected.
	...

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