Chile looks to the future with constitutional reform on neuro-rights

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chile is close to becoming the first country in the world to include neuro-rights, or brain rights, in its Constitution. This bill is being closely monitored by international organizations, academics and large technology companies.

This is a far-sighted step for when the futuristic and dystopian stories of films such as Inception (2010), where human behavior is altered by implanting ideas in the brain, or The Matrix (1999), in which the main character acquires immediate knowledge through the installation of a program in his brain, become a reality.

Protecting the human mind

In order to prevent some future uses of neurotechnology, Chile is currently processing a constitutional reform that includes the concept of preserving the individual’s “physical and psychological integrity” so that “no authority or individual” may, through technology, “increase, reduce or disturb this individual integrity without due consent.”

The bill has already been unanimously passed in the Senate and is pending a second hearing in the Chamber of Deputies to become a reality embodied in the Chilean Magna Carta.

For opposition senator Guido Girardi, one of the bill’s promoters, it is a matter of protecting the “last frontier” of the human being: the mind. The ultimate goal would be to control neurotechnologies for reading and writing the brain which could record an individual’s mental data and, in the future, modify them or add new ones.

“If this technology manages to read, even before you are conscious of what you are thinking, they can write emotions, thoughts, life stories in your brain that are not yours and that your brain will not be able to distinguish whether they were the product of designs or your own,” said the senator.

Pioneer

Hence the “importance” of now legislating a still pristine reality that could threaten “the essence of the human being, his autonomy, his freedom and his free will,” Girardi stressed.

The innovative bill could be the seed of future human rights jurisprudence. Chilean Minister of Science Andrés Couve said that the debate on “neuro-rights” is “part of the consolidation of a new scientific institutionality in the country that is currently drawing international attention.

At the recent Ibero-American Summit, President Sebastián Piñera proposed to the region’s countries to jointly legislate on brain rights.

There are four basic fields that the bill proposes to legislate: safeguarding the data of the human mind or “neurodata”, establishing neurotechnology boundaries for reading and particularly writing in the brain, determining an equitable distribution of access to these technologies and setting the limits of “neuroalgorithms.”

A not-so-distant future

Spanish scientist Rafael Yuste, one of the world’s leading experts in the field, points out from Columbia University in New York that, although it may sound like science fiction, some of these technologies already exist and the more distant ones could be a reality within the next 10 years.

In fact, rats have already had images of things they have never seen implanted in their brains, which they take on as their own ideas and incorporate into their natural behavior.

“If you can get in there (into the brain’s chemical processes) and either stimulate or inhibit these processes, you can change people’s decision making. This is something we already do with animals,” says Yuste.

Augmented realities could generate the existence of hybrid humans with neurotechnological inputs with cognitive augmentation, but run the risk of taking on concepts, ideas or knowledge programmed through algorithms as their own.

“To prevent a dual-speed situation with enhanced and non-enhanced humans, we think that these neurotechnologies should be regulated from the standpoint of the universal principle of justice in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” says Yuste.

“A new Renaissance”

In 2013, ex-president Barack Obama promoted the brain mapping project led by Yuste and submitted his bid to investigate the causes of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and Parkinson’s to the White House, in the plan known as the BRAIN initiative (Brain Research through Innovative Advancing Neurotechnologies).

Today Yuste considers “neurotechnology” to be a “tsunami” and it is important to be prepared for when it comes. “Neurotechnology can be scary if you think of science fiction dystopian scenarios, but for every dystopian scenario there are 10 beneficial scenarios,” Yuste acknowledges, adding that he sees “the incorporation of neurotechnology for humanity as a new Renaissance.”

The benefits for humans already exist, particularly at the medical level. Neurotechnology is applied in patients with Parkinson’s disease or depression through brain stimulation with electrodes to “ease the symptoms,” explains Yuste, or in deaf people with “cochlear implants in the auditory nerve” that incorporate a microphone, pick up external sounds and activate areas of the brain so that they can hear.

In the future, this type of technology is also expected to be applied to blind people, as well as others with Alzheimer’s through the enhancement of neuronal memory circuits, the scientist adds. “It’s going to be a change for the better for the human species,” the scientist concludes.

Source: Rfi