Tech Companies Want Your Brain To Be The Next Smartphone | Professor Nita Farahany

27:11You know, there are headphones that are really high-quality headphones to be able to listen to music, but also have EEG sensors that are surrounding the cups. There are, you know, in-ear EEG devices where you can take a conference call while also having your brain activity. That's rad. There's already the ears that are on the marketplace. There's already for more than a decade a company called SmartCap that has been selling to enterprises, to workplaces, like a little what they call a life band that has EEG sensors in a little headband that can be embedded into a hard hat or a baseball cap or train conductor's hat.

27:47And there are more than 5 ,000 companies worldwide that require everything from truck drivers to mining workers to wear these devices during the workday to track if they are fatigued or awake, which is good for safety, but raises questions about, you know, to what extent can a worker in a workplace refuse to wear one of those devices? What other data is the employer collecting about the individual? Do they have a right to mental privacy in the workplace? Yeah. So this isn't a far out future. This is here. There are devices all over workplaces. You can buy it. They've been on the market for years.

28:22And that's what I think is important for people to understand because you could often imagine or you can imagine people listening thinking, there's no way I'm going to buy a device that interprets anything that comes out of my brain. But as you write in your book and as you're explaining now, there are thousands of people that use meditation headbands that track what state their meditation is, that use smart bike helmets that let them know that they're improving their performance or athletes and then workplaces. So this stuff is already here. And as you had also shared in your book, people actually upload this data to Facebook.

28:54So I'm going to get in a second to what can actually be interpreted from that data. But in terms of the workplace, so you also make important points that there are some instances where we might want to somewhat track someone's brain activity in the workplace, but used incorrectly or used nefariously, there are scenarios where it could actually impact your ability to get a promotion. You paint a fascinating foresight scenario in your book. So could you make the case for both? A world where it's actually a net benefit to society to have these devices and then one where it could go too far and be used against us?

29:26Yeah. So the example that I just gave about SmartCap is, I think, a great example of both good and how it could go poorly, which is having like if you have an employee who is in trucking, they're long haul trucking, they're driving for 12 hours at a time and they're driving what is essentially a weapon on a highway. right? It is a giant 18-wheeler truck. I'm always scared to pass one. I bet other people are scared to pass one. I'm always afraid they might not see me. You every now and then see a major car accident with them. And the leading cause of accidents is drowsiness while driving, not drunkenness while driving.

30:11And so you really don't want them to fall asleep at the wheel. So it turns out that in many instances, that driver assist technology that's built into these vehicles that picks up either through a camera and then like that's trained on the person's face or in combination with sensors on the vehicle itself that pick up like tiny shifts on how you use the steering wheel or tiny changes with cameras in the front of the road that are looking at the stripes on the road to see how the car is moving, that those pick up later stages of drowsiness. Like once you're already starting to be dangerously drowsy rather than earlier stages as you start to fall asleep.

30:48And if you think about it when you're falling asleep at night, like you're thinking, you're thinking, you're thinking. There's some point at which you might be like, I'm not sure if I'm asleep or awake, right? Because you're still like a little bit lucid. And you're going through these phases of sleep. Like you're going from being wide awake to asleep. It's not binary. It's not asleep and awake. And what EEG can detect is those shifts, right? And so we can sort of imagine it as like five levels, right, where level one is wide awake and level five is that you're completely asleep. And then as you start to go to level two, we should start to be worried and give you an alert.

31:24And what SmartCap can do is it can pick up those earlier stages of the transition to sleep and give an alert to the driver to be like, oh, wake up, right, you're falling asleep. That's a good thing, I think. and it's a good thing if the only thing that's being collected is the data like the inference about whether or not you're asleep if the raw EEG data that is like the brain data that's being collected the signal isn't stored and kept isn't sold to a third party isn't mined to learn anything other than which stage of sleep are you on and then you might also say and isn't shared with the employer but maybe you might think it's okay to share with the employer if the only thing you're sharing is the score one to five.

32:06That's what SmartCap does. SmartCap keeps the data on the device. They overwrite the data. They don't share with the employer anything other than the simple inference that is drawn about a score of one to five. And the employee is told all of that. They're told how it's used. They're told it's used for their safety. They are given clear disclosures about what happens to their data. There is purpose minimization. There is data minimization, sort of all best practices. Now let's imagine the alternative. You're at work and you're issued work-based AirPods or work-based earbuds, and the earbuds have EEG sensors in them.

32:43And your company doesn't have a data minimization policy. They can collect the raw data. And by here, I mean the actual brain signal data, not just like some AI interpretation of a simple metric. And they can do anything they want with it. They can track it over time. They can see that you're starting to suffer from cognitive decline over time. They can every now and then flash a picture of your boss up on your screen and see whether or not your brain signals that you like them or dislike them. They can try to figure out your political affiliation because they're trying to have a more diverse workspace.

33:19Maybe they want to know your sexual orientation, so they start to put in little probes to figure that out. Maybe they even want to figure out what your PIN or password number is to a particular account. And so they are able to mine your brain data with whatever information they flash up on the screen, like researchers have done in gaming platforms where they've been able to mine information using e.g. about a PIN number. And they do all of that because there's no restriction on what they can do with the data, how they can use the data. Or your boss calls you up and says like, hey, last quarter we did great.

33:56unfortunately, we're only going to be able to give you a 10 % raise this year, which you were expecting a much higher raise because that's what had been promised to you in your contract. You're actually thrilled because you were afraid they weren't going to have any raise at all, right? So your brain signal is like elation. You're just like delighted by this, but you keep a total poker face and you say, I'm going to need to think it over and get back to you because that's not what we had agreed to in the contract. Your boss is able to offer you 20%, but you know, is starting with 10 % rather than 20.

34:28You guys hang up, the boss is able to look at the brain data, sees that you were totally elated by it. You come back the next day and you say, listen, the contract said 20%, I'm willing to settle for 15%. And now you're terrified, right? And your boss says, I'm so sorry, like 10 % is it. Your boss already knows you were happy about it. And you're like, okay, fine, I will take the 10%, right? There's no freedom of contract in that negotiation because the informational asymmetry that's just been enabled by that brain signal is totally different than what existed before the capability of having brain activity data, which is why I say in my book, like, even the staunchest libertarian, as they approach this question, who believes in freedom of contract, right, go work somewhere else if you don't like the brain tracking device, they don't believe in that, right?

35:17They believe freedom of contract is necessary in order for that kind of theory to be true. And so I think most people would agree we have to think about what appropriate safeguards are on the collection and use of mental data within the workplace would be to ensure that there is some fair balance and some right to cognitive liberty for individuals. And what you're saying, the data that gets collected, it depends on how it's used. So the raw brain data with neural devices that exist today, so whether that is a meditation band, whether that's a cap you're wearing at work, whether that is any of the tech companies, and it's Snap, it's Amazon, it's Microsoft, they're all working on these types of devices.

35:57That raw brain data, it might tell you you're a great meditator. But if you apply an algorithm to that raw data, it could start to reveal things such as your political biases, your sexual preferences, what your password is. So you can imagine a theoretical future, or maybe not so theoretical, where a partner could get a hold of that data. And a partner could see what you're actually thinking, not thinking, but what you're feeling during the day. How loyal you feel to that relationship. All of that can be interpreted. I should just, like, on that point, there was a study, there was a researcher actually at Stanford, and a series of studies that she had done about more than a decade ago now.

36:39It was an fMRI, but where couples would want to know if the other partner was in love or in lust with them. And so they would show them pictures of their partner and they would show them pictures of like a past ex and then look at their brain activity and tell them like, oh, sorry, you're not in love with your partner. Oh, sorry. You know, this is just lust, not love. And people took that so seriously. Like the brain data revealed so much more than whatever they personally themselves felt or what they shared with each other. And it is not impossible to imagine people being in a relationship, each having these headbands and having, you know, partners say to each other, like, I want to know if you're really in love with me.

37:20Like, I want the data. Right. And so like, we're going to run this, like this new app is out. It tests by showing you a series of images about me, you know, whether your brain registers love or lust. And I like, I want the data and I want to see it. Right. So it's not necessarily like that you walk in and literally it's, you know, I now know that Sinead is just being like polite and she doesn't actually like my orange couch. It becomes like the trust and truth barometer in relationships that people say like, you know, in the same way that they want to be able to look through your phone. and see if you have any text message exchanges or whatever else.

37:54They want access to your brain data to know if you really love them or not. And so, yes, today is the check the DM, check somebody's text message in the future or in the today. Depending on the device, it is check the raw brain data to see how you actually feel or flash a photo of somebody that you think that a spouse is having an affair with and their brain can't lie. Yeah. So what are we so is it so our freedom to actually think is really now up for debate, isn't it? I mean, what is the thing that worries you the most about where we are and where we're heading? I fundamentally am worried not just about mental privacy anymore, right, which is safeguarding what's happening in our brains.

38:36I'm worried about manipulating and changing what's happening in our brains, too. And by that, I mean, you know, we're in this era of widespread AI. If you look at some of the really tragic cases that have already emerged with people interacting with AI systems and seeing how quickly people have fallen prey, especially teenagers, to, you know, suicide, like, thoughts and emotional entanglements and emotional dependency with AI systems. When you start to be able to have it be a closed loop, right, you've got Meta with its chatbots. It's able to read not just, you know, your likes and your interactions, but literally your brain signals in response to whatever the chatbot says.

39:29The chatbot is generative and is able to customize and change in response to everything you do. Or as Mark Zuckerberg recently said, he was planning on using generative AI for advertisements where every advertisement is a N of one. It's personalized literally to you. And when it's personalized not just to conscious you but subconscious you, not just to what you say and do but what you think and feel as well, I worry about the kind of instrumentation of humanity that goes beyond just your ability to think private thoughts but to be able to think thoughts that are your own, right? That's the kind of even more fundamental cognitive autonomy that I'm worried about.

40:11And say more about that, that because we're in this feedback loop, so AI is learning about you as you're engaging with it, and then it is slowly, it is understanding how you're actually feeling about what you're engaging with it because if it has your brain data, it also has everything else you've ever done online. It is able to, in some ways, insert thoughts that weren't your own by slowly nudging you down a certain path? Yeah, well, so think about it this way, which is already it's clear from AI systems that they're able to know human cognitive biases, right? Whether that's authority bias that, you know, we're more likely to rely on an AI system or interact with an AI system if it presents it as authoritative.

40:57Or framing effects, right? What it chooses to frame things as and how it frames them. or, you know, being able to, like with recommender systems, which are very good, like on TikTok, to be able to figure out pretty precisely and quickly what will keep you glued to the device, right? So they have an optimization target, which is to optimize the time that's spent online. And so it figures out like, oh, you're reacting to this kind of video, so I'm going to serve up this kind of video. All of that data is behavioral data, which is quite good, but not precise. when you think about brain data think about it as like the missing piece it's the subconscious data it's the inward information it's the piece of yourself that you do not yet reveal to the world and when you reveal that signal that can now be mined and used to customize all of that even more precisely suddenly you have the kind of stickiest content in the world and not just sticky content but like oh you didn't quite react positively to that or i'm trying to get you to really react negatively to that, right, I can shape and change as a company like Meta, whatever that data is.

42:06And so I worry that that's the kind of world that we're entering into if there are no safeguards for cognitive autonomy and cognitive liberty, is that there's nothing which prevents, you know, advertisements which are targeted to your, you know, inward reaction to information, that there's nothing that prevents a chat bot from, you know, cultivating even more emotional dependency because it's optimizing user engagement to exploit the kind of weaknesses of human cognitive, you know, biases to be able to keep people online, to optimize data, or even, you know, to present increasingly more radical information to them or increasingly more politically, you know, kind of siloed information to them as a possibility.

42:55So the brain really becomes this final frontier when you look at it with this full ecosystem. So it's not just that there's the brain data that you're going to give off when you have some of these wristbands or these rings or these earbuds, but in combination with AI that's constantly learning about you, studying you, studying all of the data that you're giving off, there's this full ecosystem that is now making a prediction about you and swaying you towards the answer that is going to be in the best interest of a private company. And so when we have, when there's a lot of those neuroscience debates around, do we have free will, do we not?

43:31This is actually where that conversation needs to happen, because you have an AI system that is going to make a prediction about what you're most likely to do before you do it, and then nudge you that way. And with the final frontier of brain data, knowing that you did react to that face cream that you thought was out of budget, but you reacted in a way that showed, I should, I probably need this. I have this insecurity. It showed that, you know, you gave off some self-doubt signal. That's going to continue to come up in front of you. Yeah, exactly. And that's like, that's, I think, the piece that's most important to recognize when we think about it from a law or policy perspective, is that you can't single out one technology to regulate if you're trying to address the concern here, right?

44:16It's not just neural sensors and brain data. It's not just AI, you know, chatbots. It's the broader kind of cognitive autonomy, cognitive liberty that's at risk. And so when you think about it, picking out one technology, one sensor, one stream, one, you know, kind of aspect of privacy would be kind of missing the forest for the trees. And that bigger picture of what's at stake is, I think, the thing that we have to start grappling with really seriously, knowing that we are now, you know, at that moment of the final frontier, right? There's kind of no other data to go for by these companies. And it's just like within that, it's really important to realize the vertical integration that's happening, right?

45:01It's not like your brain data is over here by these medical companies, and your social media data is over here by the big players like Meta. It's Meta, who has the brain data, who has the, you know, VR devices, who has the social media platforms, who is developing the generative AI, you know, advertisements. And when it's the same company that Vertically Integrated has all of your data as a full stack, the risk that that presents is really amplified in ways that we didn't have before. And when you say cognitive liberty, if you were to summarize what that contains. In a world where we have cognitive liberty, where we also have these brain implants or neuro devices, what does that mean that we have?

45:46Yeah, I mean, it's context specific, right? Generally, what it means is we have a right to self-determination over our brain and mental experiences. Like, that's how we should understand it. And that's going to look different in different settings. If you're in an educational setting, you would have a right to actually have freedom of thought in that setting. That might even entail things like academic freedom more broadly. It's not just about technology. But it's, you know, the right to be able to voice your views, to be able to keep your views private, to not have them manipulated and coercively shaped.

46:16That kind of right to self-determination in the workplace, it would mean that, you know, you would have broader rights that would safeguard mental privacy, that would prohibit the kind of collection that happens in the bossware and surveillance that happens in those settings. in a police setting, you'd have a right not to have your brain interrogated and, you know, to be safeguarded against it. But you'd also have a right against brainwashing. You know, you can imagine there have been a number of people who propose things like, well, once you have really effective brain computer interface devices, maybe rather than prison sentences, you ought to just mentally rehabilitate people.

46:49Like, that's really Orwellian. And you can quickly see how badly that goes for every divergent thinker in the world about what people think brainwashing might look like or, you know, moral rehabilitation might look like. So it's really safeguarding our mental spaces, which I think is the most important thing in the digital age. Like, I just don't think that people appreciate how much, like, our cognitive autonomy has been compromised in the digital era and what prioritizing that would look like. Like, it would fundamentally change how we think about design of products if what you have to prioritize as cognitive liberty, not cognitive co-option.

47:28And when you think about all of the thoughts that you have in a day, I mean, some great, some not so great, who would you be if you felt like those thoughts were being observed? And in many ways, what you're thinking can already be inferred by your digital footprint, where you go, your geolocation, and so forth. But in that final frontier, as the term you use, if you actually couldn't let your thoughts just be, who would you become? Who would you be in that level of surveillance? But I think a lot of people listening would say, and the obvious conclusion is, well, at least under law, my thoughts are private.

48:06So in a court of law, are thoughts private? it? I mean, if I have anything to say about it, yes, right? But the truth is right now, no, right? We have rights to freedom of speech under the First Amendment, which are really restrictions on your freedom of speech. That's what you have a right to, particularly government restrictions on your freedom of speech. You have some rights that might apply, like if a court tries to compel your thoughts to speak against you in a criminal case, you might have a right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. If they try to search your brain, you might have a right under the Fourth Amendment, you know, kind of search and seizure, right, against unreasonable searches and seizures, although even those rights may be quite limited, and I get into that in the battle for your brain as well.

48:57But there's no overall right to cognitive of liberty. We might find it in the First Amendment, freedom of speech, to say that freedom of thought is an implied or, you know, kind of necessary precursor. I'd say that's unlikely under the current U.S. Supreme Court to find implied rights within the existing U.S. Constitution. And there's no right to mental privacy, although there are a few states that have put safeguards around neural data. But those aren't rights to thought. Those are rights about the, you know, kind of secondary or third party use of neural data. So, you know, there are efforts underway.

49:38I was a U.S. representative to developing a set of standards at UNESCO, but the U.S. has just pulled out of UNESCO, and so it's unlikely that that will have force or effect here in the U.S., and that's a soft law instrument. It's a set of standards. It's not law. Under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, we have a right to privacy, which most likely includes a right to mental privacy. There's an absolute right to freedom of thought, and there's a right to self-determination. But human rights don't have strong enforcement mechanisms, and so they have to actually be enforced through law. And then we have a process underway at the Uniform Laws Commission, which is a non-governmental organization that is developing a potential set of recommendations around what a model state law might look like for mental privacy.

50:35But again, that's a model state law. It's not adopted. It doesn't yet exist. So all of that is to say there is a lot that needs to be done in this space to try to figure out how and whether there is a right to mental privacy, to freedom of thought, what kinds of safeguards might be put into place. And then if it would cover not just like detection of your thoughts or misuse of your thoughts, but also, for example, safeguards against mental manipulation, like we're seeing in, you know, kind of chatbot suicide cases. So as it stands today, there are efforts to safeguard what it means to think freely.

51:16But you are not legally speaking granted freedom of thought as it stands today. There is no law that actually deems your thoughts private. it. And if we look at precedent where now Fitbit evidence is now coming on the stand and we see Amazon Alexa evidence coming on the stand and it's gone both ways, it's helped people show they're innocent or that they're guilty. There is a world in which your thoughts could be used against you in a court of law. Yeah. I mean, I think quite likely. And those are some of the examples that I point to in my book to say, like, look, if we look at the Fitbit data, if we look at these other cases, there are doctrines that are called like the third party doctrine, which is when you have a device that you kind of willingly participate in the conveyance of your data to that third party, right?

52:05You give to Fitbit your data. And maybe you give it for your own personal purpose, but you have no longer kept it private. When you start to do that with brain data, it's no longer searching you for the like the police to try to get data about what you were thinking at the time so you know you had your airpods on or more likely you had your watch on and weren't thinking about it while you committed some crime and the police subpoena that evidence from whoever the manufacturer of that watch is mata apple etc that's not a search of you you don't have a Fourth Amendment right to complain anymore about the government obtaining that data.

52:45And that's the way in which a lot of that data is likely to show up in courtrooms is that you don't have the kind of standing or right to complain about it once you have willingly participated in sharing it with third parties. And are there examples of people's thoughts or brain data being used against them to convict people of crimes? Is that, are we heading to a future where Your thoughts may be used to convict you of a crime or are already here. Yeah. I mean, so we're already there. And that's, I get into some of that, some of the examples of that, like the early examples of that, I think, are in the book, which is one of the areas that has already shown up, especially in other countries.

53:24But even here in the United States, there are a couple of examples of defendants willingly submitting to P300 interrogations. So P300 is a brain signal that's like before you are conscious of recognizing something, your brain has a little kind of earlier signal of recognition that can be measured by EEG. And that's this P300 signal. And so in some criminal cases, people have been shown images of crime scene details that they shouldn't have any recognition or knowledge of. And then what their brain signals reveal have been used as evidence of guilt or innocence against them. In India, this is used quite frequently, a version of this called BIOS, looking at brain oscillation signals, where it's been quite controversial.

54:12But there's more than 400 cases that have been documented where this evidence has been used to convict people of crimes, even of murder, based on recognition of a crime scene detail. It's apparently been used in interrogation and in other settings in places like Singapore and the UAE and even in Japan. And so it is the kind of thing that we should not just sort of imagine as a sci-fi scenario. It's already happening across the world. And from your vantage point, somebody who's so close to the data, is it possible that we could move toward the future where you could be prosecuted or persecuted for what you're thinking before you even commit a crime?

54:53I mean, I think we all kind of laugh and joke at Minority Report, but there's something there's some truth in science fiction. It often is correct, at least in some elements, directionally. So is there a potential future for where your thoughts, just your thoughts, could get you in trouble? Yeah, I mean, there is at least one setting that I could imagine that happening, which is the conspiracy to commit a crime. Right. So in criminal law, at least in the United States, a bright line that has mattered for a very long time, and I have a hard time imagining us moving past it really anytime soon, is that you have to have completed a crime before we hold you guilty of it.

55:32like this hope of, you know, at the last minute, you may change your mind, or we want to give you every possible incentive to avoid committing the crime. Because if just thinking about the crime is the same as me completing the crime, and I know I'll be convicted of it either way, like, what incentive do I have to not actually just go ahead and complete the crime once it's popped into my head, right? But conspiracy to commit a crime with another person is more of a thought crime anyway, right? You think about committing the crime, you plan to commit the crime, like, that what is the crime is the planning and the engagement of planning.

56:06But maybe like one of the things that's very hard to find is that really overt evidence of planning. And suppose that brain data one day could make that kind of evidence of planning much more convincing and much more concrete. Then I think you could imagine that the line of like what kinds of overt acts do you need and furtherance of thinking about the crime would be a lot smaller. And so then, like, conspiracy to commit a crime becomes a thought crime, not just a crime of actual actions. I mean, when you're in rooms with policymakers, with regulators all the time, you're on many, many boards, how are you advising them?

56:47How are you explaining concepts that some people would just respond with slow blinks and think you're talking about a movie script? Yeah. Do policymakers seem like they're understanding they're keeping up, they're concerned? Or is there a gap and a delay? And how fast is this moving? I mean, you're talking about stuff that's being sold in Best Buy. Yeah. So, I mean, it's both, right? So on the one hand, intuitively people seem to get why mental privacy matters, right, across the aisle. Whether it's Republicans or Democrats, there doesn't seem to be a lot of political division on an understanding about why mental privacy matters.

57:23And that's encouraging in a way, right? I think everybody can understand why coming into my living room and seeing my orange couch, that they don't necessarily want me to know that they hate my couch. And then they can extrapolate from there all of the other things that they might be thinking in a given day that they don't want other people to know, especially politicians, right? And so for them, I think they can get it pretty quickly. The technical details become challenging, though, right? And then the political lobbying becomes really challenging as well. Because, you know, it's not lost on meta that if they make the narrowest possible regulation that only regulates brain sensors and allows them to capture every other kind of data freely, that that's good for them.

58:05And for a policymaker to understand the kind of broader concept of cognitive liberty and the implications across the board of modern technologies and how susceptible humans are, it's hard. It's hard for them to figure out technologically what's happening. It's hard for them to fully appreciate it. It's hard for them to face the really intense lobbying efforts that companies put into place to kind of avoid any regulation that might limit their capacity to mine as much psychological and behavioral data from us as possible. So I'd say it depends on what nature of regulator you're talking about, right?

58:43And human rights, you know, situations, they all get it. They all want to act quickly. And it doesn't move as fast as you would like for it to, but it moves faster than it has in other areas. But in U.S. policymaking, it's hard to get anything other than the most restrictive legislations passed. On the flip side, there are a lot of reasons to want some of these devices in our world. I mean, in a world where we do have even a wristband that's starting to understand our brain signals, what could be possible? And why is that world worth fighting for in a way that we get it right? Yeah. So, I mean, I am far from a tech Luddite in this space, right?

59:21I actually am somebody who has used neurotechnology for deeply personal reasons to overcome PTSD, to work on my migraines as ways of trying to find alternative non-drug-based interventions for migraine, to neurostimulation devices that have been therapeutic applications for my migraines, to meditation as a way to try to get into meditation since I was having a hopeless time and being able to do so. And there are so many benefits to it cognitively and mentally and health wise. That's just the tip of the iceberg. You know, it's shocking to me how little information we have about our brains, even though it is in so many ways the part of ourselves that we most closely associate with our sense of self.

1:00:09And, you know, I think that lots of people appreciate the ability to do things like track their heart rate or their VO2 max over time, or be able to know if, you know, through one of the sensors that are in their watches these days, if they have an arrhythmia, being able to, you know, predict things like their periods based on temperature and morning, you know, kind of fluctuations and basal body temperature to being able to track sleep activity overnight and, you know, get pretty precise health metrics from what their rings and what their other devices provide to them. Now, just imagine unlocking the world in which you get insights into what's actually happening in your brain from, you know, more serious medical conditions, like are you going to have an epileptic seizure minutes to, you know, more than an hour before it occurs to am I going to have a migraine tomorrow?

1:01:02or are there ways that I can stave it off earlier? To are there the earliest signs of glioblastoma such that you could have intervention before it becomes fatal? To am I stressed? Do I work better at home? Do I work better in the office? What's the cognitive tax to me when I switch between tasks over time? What does taking a five minute micro nap do for my productivity or for my health over time? Like these are just some of the things you could imagine And there will be so many more where if we prioritized and treated brain health as seriously as we treat the other aspects of our health, it could really be revolutionary for human well-being and flourishing.

1:01:43And so we should want that. I mean, I think that to be able to reverse course on one of the leading causes of human suffering, which is neurological disease and suffering, and to have the insights to be able to address it would be extraordinary. The question is, how do you get that beautiful future without losing your mental privacy and what it means to be human? And I think it has to start by understanding that this is really the final frontier of privacy. Like, we have to make different choices. And it's interesting to note that Meta, who really has been the biggest culprit of misappropriation of data over time, has launched the neural band with a different policy than they have had with every other device that they've launched, which is they are keeping for now the data, neural data on the device.

1:02:31Only inferences ever leave device. Like they have heard that this is something that they need to treat differently, and they are for now. That could change tomorrow, right? They could change their terms of service and make different choices. But the fact that they recognize it's different means everybody else should recognize it's different too. And we shouldn't just make it a voluntary industry standard, right? We need to put into place the right set of incentives, the sticks and the carrots to make sure that that becomes the norm. and that overall there are things like user level controls on devices.

1:03:06If I want to wear a multifunctional device like a watch and I want to use it to tell time sometimes and to track my brain activity at other times, I should be able to turn off the sensors, right, and have that kind of fine level control. And right now none of that exists, but if we were prioritizing cognitive liberty and cognitive autonomy, we would call for those kinds of user level controls and determinations. So, you know, I just think we have to rethink what the next steps are as we enter into this new era. And I mean, the things that you pointed out, usually when it comes to mental health, it is after the traumatic event or after you're feeling down or anxious that you then flag something.

1:03:47But imagine a world in which a week before your anxiety really kicks into high gear or you don't have to wake up and think, wow, I feel low today. I don't know why. you have information about why that is and why that's maybe connected to a certain traumatic event or a certain memory that's triggering a certain attachment style, whatever it may be, empowering you about what's actually happening inside your mind. And you do point to a future where it's really about the choices that we make and the policy choices, the design choices that are going to incentivize a future where this could go pretty well or a future where it doesn't.

1:04:23And even when you look at what could be possible with communication, I mean, if we've gotten this far in society with the invention of writing and reading, and I think people forget that these are technologies, right? We now have just become so used to reading and writing that it seems like it just came naturally when we were kind of, you know, in our evolutionary state. We invented these technologies for the sole reason of getting what's in my brain into yours. That's right. And it's a very low bandwidth technology. I mean, when I try to explain how I feel. Right. I mean, they were fundamentally change, you know, the transmission of knowledge between people.

1:05:00It was going to destroy human culture. It was going to lead to a proliferation of lies and, you know, synthetic information. And, you know, so people have been afraid at every one of these steps. But you're right. We could have a new form of communication. Right. A new form of communication. And it did change the brain. I think writing and reading changed our we started to process symbols better than we did the face. So we've always done this, but it also led to culture. It could be passed down. It could be memorialized. And you could see it and read it centuries out. All of these amazing things.

1:05:29So in a world where I could actually give you my thoughts, instead of trying to explain to you how I'm feeling, you could feel what I'm going through, what could be unlocked. I mean, two scientists sharing thoughts on a breakthrough. That potential is really exciting. But of course, it comes with all of these other risks and downsides that we would want to mitigate for. but the potential for a world in which we share thoughts, while it seems scary, so did a lot of these other inventions. And things did get crazy with the invention of writing, and then therefore the printing press. Things got a little out of hand.

1:06:03But in a world where we get this right, that to me is really fascinating what could be possible. I agree with you. I mean, I think it's exciting to think about what a different form of thought sharing could look like, to be able to share the feelings, the experiences, the visual connection, kind of like a robust thought as opposed to that kind of narrow bandwidth thought that I'm able to share with you right now. But getting that right means, you know, figuring out what we mean by human meaning, what we mean by human, like what it means to be human, what it means to connect with another human, because, you know, we haven't had to think about like what makes you, you and me, me, even though we're related to each other, we're shaping and changing each other's minds all the time by being in conversation with each other.

1:06:51We have this sense of like, I'm an island of me and you are an island of you and that I have kind of rights and protections over me. It's a lot more fluid than that, right? We are shaped and changed by things around us all the time, but there is a core of that that really matters, right? Your capacity to form your identity requires that you have some control over the entity that is you. And you can just easily imagine a world in which there is that kind of robust thought sharing of thought shaping and manipulation, right? And so being able to have that kind of autonomy over self and identity and the right to make choices about what you let in and what you don't let in, those are, I think, the kinds of hard questions that we haven't had to have before, but that we have to have now.

1:07:41So this is actually just sort of personal curiosity. You had written in one of your sub-stacks that it is possible that AI might be granted freedom of speech. And I'm trying to understand what that loophole is. Well, it's not even necessarily that the AI will have freedom of speech so much as AI speech will be protected under freedom of speech. So what that is, is there and I actually get into this in significant detail in my lecture on manipulation in my AI law and policy class about what the arguments there are. So if a developer is making choices for an AI from everything, like the training data that goes into it, the parameters and like what they're going to set is the parameters, the architecture of the system itself, how to do reinforcement learning through human feedback, the kind of training that happens on the later end.

1:08:34those are all expressive choices, which have an impact on how the chat bot or whatever the AI is, has its output, which could mean that the speech output is so mixed with expressive content and expressive decisions of the developer that it's protected in that way. The second view of it is that you as a listener have listener First Amendment rights. And so you have a right to receive information as well. And so on the other end, the user has First Amendment rights. And so restricting what the AI can have as output could have limitations on your right to receive information. And these are views that other people have advocated in the kind of chatbot cases where they've filed pretty extensive friend of the court briefs that lay out these arguments on the First Amendment.

1:09:26And so far, like courts haven't fully had to grapple with this. But in almost every software case that courts have had to grapple with First Amendment, you know, kind of content restrictions, they've come out on the side of saying that whatever it is, is protected by First Amendment. The strongest argument I've heard about kind of worries about regulating the speech output of AI is that within the next few years that you can expect that almost all of human speech will be mediated through AI in some form or another. And that means that almost every way that you would express yourself is somehow co-mingled with AI.

1:10:03And if we were to try to go through and figure out like which pieces are AI and which pieces are human, it would mean almost everything that we say or do would be subject to government regulation, which we wouldn't want. So it becomes very dangerous overreach if we don't recognize first member rights. And that I think is a compelling argument for us to be cautious about how much we regulate AI speech from that perspective, given how quickly the trajectory and the uptake of AI is in the world. So AI will be much more like the pen and paper. It's merged in an extension of us, and that's why you write.

1:10:37So if we're worried about things like AI psychosis because we're getting manipulated down some loophole, go upstream and argue that we actually don't even have freedom of thought when we engage with these systems because of the manipulation and because of everything that they know about us and the generative character. So that's where the argument starts. Yeah, exactly. And for my final question for anyone who is listening today, what can people do in their own capacity as citizens and as consumers? Because we do have some buying power in this to shape how this goes. Yeah, there are a lot of opportunities for individuals.

1:11:11And, you know, there's advocacy abilities for individuals. So we can just start there, which is, you know, right now, for example, if we have a functioning government at any point in time, there is the LEAD Act that has been proposed in Congress. This is an AI accountability act. What's interesting about it is that it specifies manipulation as a form of harm. And that's a great starting point to think about actually putting into place some liability. And you can just imagine picking up your phone, calling your senator's office and saying, like, I'm really interested in the LEAD Act and I'd like to see it introduced.

1:11:48And it passed and it's notable that it's Durbin and Hawley who introduced it. It's a bipartisan piece of legislation. Like pick up your phone and call and advocate for that. That matters, that kind of advocacy. And that would impact how chatbots are built. That would impact how chatbots are built. It would impact how like how we think about, you know, manipulation across the board. It would be an important move toward protecting cognitive liberty. And, you know, that would be great. You know, that kind of advocacy, there are so many different AI legislation that is impacted in the space that is being proposed in states around the country.

1:12:22Taking the step to just make a call actually has a much bigger effect than people realize. Like your state legislature wants to hear from you, your state senator wants to hear from you, and it has a huge impact on the outcome. Then starting to actually make choices that are aligned with cognitive liberty matter too. So for example, if you're using AI, which I am, and I think it's a terrific tool when used correctly, I right now am not allowing it to use any of the data to train. I'm not, like I have all of my settings to say, like I don't want memory preserved across chats. I don't want to develop a relationship with my AI chatbot.

1:13:00And so I strongly encourage that people do the same, which is set all of the settings in ways that actually preserve your cognitive liberty and cognitive autonomy, that also sends a strong signal to the companies, which is what we want to do. We want to send those strong signals. And then it's to start to realize some of the things that are being lost in your own cognitive liberty. And the biggest ones, and this is a big focus of my next book, looks at some of the kind of skills that we're losing that are kind of core to our cognitive autonomy. And these are around like your connection to your own physical body, your cognitive offloading and the impact that has on your competence and your relationships between other people.

1:13:39And so focusing on those three fundamental capacities help you rebuild your own self-determination, which is really the foundation of cognitive liberty. That's a kind of personal practice that you can do. The simplest thing that I tell people is when you wake up in the morning, spend five minutes scanning your own body before you reach for your phone. Like it's a small intervention, but it's a huge intervention because the fundamental disconnect between what we used to do, which is to be like be built on like grounding yourself in your own body to immediately starting with external input into your body actually rewrites your neurology in ways that are not good for you.

1:14:21So like get up and go to the bathroom before you read your phone and don't take your phone with you, right? Like just spend ideally an hour, but at the very least five minutes reconnecting with your own body and fully waking up before you have that flood of, you know, extroceptive and like signals going into your body. So start there to like ground yourself in you. And the more you develop that grounding yourself in you, actually the stronger your safeguards are against manipulation and everything else, because you have a strong sense of your own gut instinct because you have one, right? So those are some of the things I think people can do.

1:14:53And then just as a self plug, read my book, it'll give you some good ways to do that. And then follow me on Substack because I am giving, you know, updates about everything that's happening in this space along with the kinds of things that you can do as well. And my, you know, Substack appropriately is called Thinking Freely because those are the things that I'm really focused on in the digital age. I was just going to shout out your Substack and your book. I've read your book twice. Thank you. And I'm an avid reader of the Substack. And you break it down in ways that you don't have to have a neuroscience background, a legal background, an AI background.

1:15:24Anybody can understand. Thank you. It has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for making the time. We can't wait to have you back, especially when you have your next book. Thank you. Follow Nita on all of the channels. And thanks again for making the time with us. Thanks for the time and the wonderful questions and conversation.