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Vancouver ‘Robo Cop’? a Neuralink brain implant story

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Before diving into the story, Vancouver Police Department’s ‘robo cop’ was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) a few years ago and for anyone unfamiliar with the disease, here’s more from the ALS Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease (MND) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a rare terminal neurodegenerative disease defined by the progressive loss of both upper and lower motor neurons that normally control voluntary muscle contraction. ALS is the most common of the motor neuron diseases.[8] ALS often presents with gradual muscle stiffness, twitches, weakness, and wasting. Motor neuron loss typically continues until the ability to eat, speak, move, and breathe without mechanical support is lost. At least 50% of people with ALS experience significant changes in thinking and behavior, with 15% of individuals going on to develop frontotemporal dementia.[9][10] …

Lee Marten, right, is a Vancouver police sergeant who is one of the first Canadians to be implanted with a Neuralink brain chip in a bid to help him with symptoms of ALS or spinal injuries. His wife, Lisa, is seen in Toronto Western Hospital on May 20 before his procedure. (Submitted by Lisa Marten)

That prognosis makes the decision to go ahead with an experimental brain implant instantly understandable. Lyndsay Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news online website details the officer’s and his family’s story,

Sitting in his wheelchair, hands at his side, 48-year-old Lee Marten looks at the computer screen in front of him and imagines moving the cursor across the screen. As quickly as he thinks it, the arrow shifts. 

Marten, who is a sergeant with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) currently on leave, uses the cursor to type letters on a digital keyboard — as fast as, or faster, than human fingers. Right away, the latest Toronto Blue Jays score pops up. 

“I know it seems like science fiction,” he said. “But here I am and it works.” 

On May 20 [2026], Marten became one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive a Neuralink brain implant, as part of a clinical trial at University Health Network’s (UHN) Toronto Western Hospital. 

He is just the 26th person in the world to undergo the procedure, which is being tested on people unable to move because of ALS or spinal injuries. At least two other Canadians, both quadriplegics, are also known to have received the implant in Canada, and a dual American-Canadian citizen with ALS has had the procedure done in the U.S.

Neuralink is owned by controversial trillionaire [not now on August 5, 2026] Elon Musk, and the hospital has faced criticism for participating in the trial.

But Marten sees the procedure as a chance to improve his quality of life and advance science in a way that could help others. 

“Getting a terminal diagnosis, you don’t have much to look forward to,” he said. 

“This is going to maybe improve my time that I have left, and allow me to be a kind of trailblazer for anyone else going through this.”

Long road to diagnosis

Marten’s symptoms began in April 2022. He was working on the bike patrol with the Vancouver Police Department when his left foot began to drop. 

At first, he thought it was a cycling injury, but he kept losing his balance. A fall off the steps to his garage led to a broken leg.

Doctors attributed the symptoms to a benign brain tumour and Marten had surgery to remove it in March 2024. 

But the mobility problems continued to worsen, and three years after he first felt unwell, the devastating diagnosis came. ALS was destroying the nerve cells in his brain and spinal cord. It is progressive and there is no cure.

…

The disease’s progression varies from patient to patient, but Marten said the hardest part about knowing he will die from ALS is that he won’t be able to watch his children, Rys, 14, and Carys, 11, grow up.

…

“People joke that I’m going to be RoboCop,” he said, laughing, in an interview shortly before the procedure.

“I’m going to be a cyborg, right?” 

…

The Martens’ biggest hope for the surgery was that it would allow him to communicate with family through a computer after he is no longer able to physically speak.

Lisa said this will be helpful with medical decisions, including those around a potential medically-assisted death. 

“We can get his true feelings on what he wants to do,” she said.

…

·

About the implant

Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article provides some technical details, Note: Links have been removed,

…

The trial at UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital, CAN-PRIME, is one of a handful of Neuralink studies taking part across the world, including ones in the U.S., U.K. and Abu Dhabi.

The procedure involves implanting more than 1,000 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, into the brain’s motor cortex. Surgeons open the skull and prepare the site, but the electrodes are inserted by a two-metre-tall robot shipped to Toronto from San Francisco. 

“The robot is crucial because it’s much more accurate and precise than a human neurosurgeon could do,” said Dr. Andres Lozano, who leads the neurosurgery team at UHN’s Toronto Western. 

The hospital has faced criticism for participating in the trial, including from an emergency physician who said that Canadian institutions should not work with companies owned by Musk, who was behind U.S. government cuts to global health. Neuralink has also been criticized for how it shares information. 

Lozano said the trial went through a series of ethical screens, and passed all of them. [emphasis mine]

“We jumped at the opportunity to participate because we think the technology is very advanced and we think it really has an opportunity to help patients,” he said, adding that it may be possible in the future for paralyzed patients to control movement of a wheelchair, or even a specialized exoskeleton, through Neuralink brain implants. 

…

A ‘scary’ change in plans

The day of Marten’s surgery started with stress when they learned his surgery would be different from those of previous Neuralink patients. 

For the first time, surgeons would not peel back the dura, or protective layer around the brain. Instead, the robot would insert the chip through the dura.

Lozano called it a “tremendous advance in technology” that could make the operation simpler, and safer. 

But the new plan made Lisa nervous. 

“They didn’t tell us until just before he went in that he was going to be the first person in the world to have the new procedure done,” she said. “That’s where it got a little scary.” 

Lee, on the other hand, was ready.

“I’m like, let’s get ‘er done.” 

The procedure took six hours and doctors say it was a success.

Marten woke up in the ICU with 27 staples in his scalp and a brutal headache. Painkillers helped, and he says about an hour after waking up, he was working with Neuralink engineers to try out the device.

“They told me I was the first out of all the participants [to] do that so soon after surgery,” he said. “And I’m like, well, Canadians are just built tougher.” 

…

Since returning to Vancouver, he has “homework” that consists of doing exercises every couple of days so the Neuralink engineers can monitor how the device is working. It keeps him busy. 

Marten has plans to make playlists for his kids, and play video games with them, even when he can no longer move or speak. 

…

Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article offers more including images and an embedded video. There’s also a five minute CBC Radio interview of Lindsay Duncombe by Stephen Quinn on CBC’s The Early Edition. Dunscombe was a bit of an ‘easy, breezy’ interview subject who displays the kind of enthusiasm you’d expect from someone presenting science to children; the sort of thing you might expect at a science centre. (Confession: Sometimes I sound like an enthused science fan too.)

It doesn’t seem enough to say bravo to the Martens; they are facing an extraordinarily difficult time with grace and courage.

Now, onto some of the issues not explored in Duncombe’s article or interview.

Ethics and other issues

What struck me in Duncombe’s account is the UHN’s failure to alert the family to a change in how the surgery would be conducted. Six hours notice? Someone had to know that procedure would be different. Wasn’t the surgical team prepped for this change long before? There seems to no reason to give the family only sic hours notice.

Regarding ethics, there’s this somewhat unclear statement in Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article “Lozano (Dr. Andres Lozano, who leads the neurosurgery team) said the trial went through a series of ethical screens, and passed all of them.”

  • Whose (which institution? Health Canada, University of Toronto, Toronto Western Hospital?) ethical screens?
  • Who (which institution? …) conducted these analyses?
  • How did giving the family six hours notice of a significant change in the operation pass an ethical test?
  • Does the university and/or the hospital have a financial relationship of any kind with Neuralink?
  • Does the surgical lead, Dr. Andres Lozano, have any kind of financial relationship with Neuralink?
  • Is it a good idea to get brain implants from commercial companies?
  • What about Lee Marten’s thoughts? Does he own them?

I have over the years written a number of pieces about brain or neural implants with a focus on some of these questions. This list includes a number of my postings but I’m going to start the list with a CBC article by Sheena Goodyear,

There appears to be some action by the Canadian federal government to address privacy issues with neural data. First, here’s a February 13, 2026 opinion piece by Kris Klein for the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) about the Canadian federal government’s addition to a list of what constitutes sensitive information, Note: A link has been removed,

Privacy professionals have long lived with a comforting illusion: that “sensitive information” is a relatively stable concept. Health data is sensitive. Financial data is sensitive. Social Insurance Numbers are sensitive. This mental list has served us well for years and fits neatly into training decks and compliance frameworks.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada [OPC] has gently reminded us that this list is not static.

This week, the OPC updated its Interpretation Bulletin on Sensitive Information under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which consolidates court decisions and OPC findings on what counts as sensitive personal information and what that means for consent and safeguards. What’s new? Your brain has now officially entered the chat. The OPC added neural data among the types of personal information that will generally be considered sensitive and require a higher degree of protection.

The bulletin explains a principle privacy professionals know well but sometimes treat as theoretical. While some types of information will almost always be sensitive, any personal information can become sensitive depending on context. Names and addresses are the classic example. Usually harmless, unless the context reveals something deeply personal about the individual.

Under PIPEDA, sensitivity drives two critical compliance outcomes: the form of consent an organization must obtain and the level of security safeguards it must apply. In other words, sensitivity is not an academic label. It determines how hard organizations must work to justify collection, explain purposes and protect the data they hold.

Neural data, now formally on the “sensitive personal information” list broadly refers to information derived from the activity of the nervous system, particularly the brain. This can include data collected through technologies such as electroencephalography, brain computer interfaces, neuroimaging tools or wearable devices designed to measure brain signals. In practice, this can range from clinical brain scans to consumer-facing technologies that claim to monitor our focus, fatigue or emotional states.

In a nutshell, it is data generated by your brain doing brain things.

Used responsibly, neural data has clear benefits. In health care, it can support diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation for neurological conditions. In accessibility contexts, brain computer interfaces have the potential to restore communication or mobility for individuals with severe disabilities. In workplace safety and transportation, fatigue detection technologies are being explored as tools to reduce accidents.

At the same time, the risks are not subtle. Neural data is deeply intimate. It may reveal health conditions, cognitive states or emotional responses that individuals themselves do not fully understand or expect to disclose. Unlike a password, you can’t simply reset your brain. Unlike a credit card number, neural patterns are not easily replaced.

The OPC’s decision to flag neural data as sensitive reflects these realities. It signals that some information is so personal that heightened care is not optional. Organizations collecting or experimenting with neural data should assume that meaningful consent must be robust, safeguards must be proportionate and purposes must be tightly defined.

…

The February 10, 2026 Interpretation Bulletin: Sensitive Information from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) mentioned in Klein’s opinion piece specifically mentions neural data but only once, Note: A link has been removed,

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has added “neural data” to the list of personal information that will generally be considered sensitive and require a higher degree of protection. See the section: Application by the Courts and the OPC in Different Contexts.

…

However, the PIPEDA could be scrapped for new legislation introduced on June 15, 2026 as described in a federal government backgrounder,

Today [June 16, 2026], the Government of Canada introduced Bill C-36, an Act to enact the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act (PPCDA), to amend the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act [PIPEDA] and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts.

…

In a June 17, 2026 blog posting on his companies website (CloudForce) Anton Kuznetsov outlines changes in the proposed bill C-36 that will affect Canadian businesses, Note: Links have been removed,

…

Why Canada Needed a New Privacy Law

PIPEDA has governed commercial privacy for 25 years. It was built for a world without cloud infrastructure, AI-driven decision-making, or mass data brokerage. Its enforcement model reflects that: the Privacy Commissioner investigates, recommends, and can apply to Federal Court, but cannot impose fines directly. The maximum penalty for a violation is $100,000.

That limitation has consequences. In 2024-25, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner received 686 breach reports from private-sector businesses under PIPEDA — affecting over 20 million Canadians. Complaints to the OPC rose 32% in the same period. (OPC 2024-25 Annual Report) The average cost of a Canadian data breach reached CA$6.98 million in 2025 — a 10.4% increase year-over-year. (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 – Canada) The enforcement regime was not designed for this environment.

Bill C-36 is the Carney government’s response — a revised version of Bill C-27, which died on the Order Paper when Parliament prorogued in January 2025. (IAPP, Canada’s Bill C-36 introduces privacy reforms, enforcement changes)

What Changes: PIPEDA to PPCDA

Bill C-36 enacts the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act (PPCDA), which replaces Part 1 of PIPEDA — the commercial privacy section. PIPEDA itself survives in narrowed form, renamed the *Electronic Documents Act*, covering only its electronic documents and signatures provisions.

…

Dr. Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law and more) offers a rather peppery analysis of the proposed legislation in a June 15, 2026 blog posting and another on June 18, 2026 on his eponymous website.

I have not been able to find a reference to neural data or any other neural implant issues in the discussion about Bill C-36. If someone has located something, please let me know in the Comments.

In the end

Given the same circumstances, if I had been presented with the choice that the Martens were given, I too would have opted for the implant. Desperation will drive you to places you might not visit elsewise.

That six hour notice of a change prior to the operation? It rings alarm bells and brings to mind “move fast and break things” usually accompanied by “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission,” both of them favourites in the technology sector. Neuralink, after all, is a company owned by Elon Musk who is not famed for his deliberation or thoughtfulness and his companies are not known for their openness (see: 2025’s “The Tesla Files; a Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth : the Inside Story of Musk’s Empire” by Sönke Iwersen for more about Musk’s Tesla operations [focus on European operations] and its level of secrecy).

There are other issues as well, what happens if the company goes out of business or discontinues this particular product?

I don’t imagine the federal government will manage to cover every contingency but it is concerning that Prime Minister Carney’s Liberals are in such a rush to stimulate ‘innovation’ that they appear oblivious to the implications of technology such as computer-brain interfaces (CBI) and more. For many, (see CBC Radio interview of Lindsay Duncombe) it is treated as the stuff of futuristic science fiction. As you can see from this piece and a cornucopia of articles elsewhere in print and online, that belief is deeply erroneous.

Hopefully, I’m wrong and the Canadian federal government is alive to the many possibilities good and ill afforded by these ‘science fiction’ technologies and is examining ways to ensure safe implementation.

BBC’s (British Broadcasting Corporation) Zoe Kleinman poses a provocative question: Will quantum be bigger than AI?

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Zoe Kleinman’s November 5, 2025 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) explores two technologies that have people excited in both the positive and the negative senses, Note: Links have been removed,

There’s an old adage among tech journalists like me – you can either explain quantum accurately, or in a way that people understand, but you can’t do both [emphasis mine].

That’s because quantum mechanics – a strange and partly theoretical branch of physics – is a fiendishly difficult concept to get your head around.

It involves tiny particles behaving in weird ways. And this odd activity has opened up the potential of a whole new world of scientific super power.

Its mind-boggling complexity is probably a factor in why quantum has ended up with a lower profile than tech’s current rockstar – artificial intelligence (AI).

This is despite a steady stream of recent big quantum announcements from tech giants like Microsoft and Google among others.

Broadly speaking, we tend to think about quantum more commonly in the form of hardware like sensors and computers, while AI is more software-based – it requires hardware to operate.

Put them together, and we might one day have a new form of technology that’s more powerful than anything we have ever created… although the word “might” is doing some heavy lifting in that particular prediction, warns Brian Hopkins, VP and principal analyst in emerging tech at research firm Forresters.

“The potential is there, but the jury is still out,” he says.

“Initial experiments suggest promise, but they all indicate that we require much more powerful quantum computers and further innovative research to effectively apply quantum effects to AI.”

In terms of their value, both are lucrative. The quantum sector could be worth up to $97bn (£74bn) by 2035, according to market research group McKinsey.

Meanwhile, AI’s value is forecast in the trillions. But they both live under the shadow of hype and the bursting of bubbles.

…

Nicely done Ms. Kleinman. It took me to long to see it but thank you for applying the uncertainty principle to science communication “… you can either explain quantum accurately, or in a way that people understand, but you can’t do both.”

Quantum bling

This passage describing a quantum computer was compelling since I have never seen one before, from Kleinman’s November 5, 2025 article, Note: A link has been removed,

…

Quantum and AI have one more thing in common – errors. While we are largely familiar now with the “hallucinations” of generative AI tools, quantum is plagued by a different kind of error.

These are caused because the state in which the particles have to operate is so fragile. The slightest change to the environment, including light and noise, can disrupt them.

It’s tricky to sustain such an environment. This week Elon Musk suggested on X that quantum computing would run best on the “permanently shadowed craters of the moon”.

Quantum computers don’t look anything like a traditional machines. There is no design blueprint, but they are currently very big.

They exist in laboratories, and the most commonly adopted format seems to include a kind of jellyfish-inspired shape.[emphasis mine].

They require extremely cold temperatures and lasers. It’s not the sort of thing you’re likely to have in your home, let alone in your pocket.

They’re also a bit bling – researchers have found that using synthetic diamonds [emphasis mine] to create qubits, which are the building blocks of quantum computers, enables them to work much closer to room temperature.

The luxury jeweller De Beers [emphasis mine] has a subsidiary company called Element Six, which claims to have launched the world’s first general-purpose quantum-grade diamond in 2020. And it has worked with Amazon Web Services on optimising artificial diamonds for future networks of quantum machines.

…

Quantum could be good for us

Kleinman reviews some of the quantum computing promises, from her November 5, 2025 article, Note: A link has been removed,

…

“The area of quantum computing is, in my mind, when you look at the applications, as big if not bigger than AI.”

Prof Sir Peter Knight is one of the UK’s top quantum experts. “Things that could take the age of the universe to calculate, even on the most powerful supercomputer, could be performed probably in seconds,” he told Dr Dr [sic]Jim Al-Khalili on BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific.

So what exactly are these gigantic, life-changing things that the machines might do once they’re ready?

As with AI, there’s a lot of quantum research directed towards improving healthcare.

Quantum computers could one day be able to effortlessly churn through endless combinations of molecules to come up with new drugs and medications – a process that currently takes years and years using classical computers.

To give you an idea of that scale – in December 2024, Google unveiled a new quantum chip called Willow, which it claimed could take five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers 10 septillion years – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

Hazra [Rajeeb Hazra, the boss of Quantinuum] says this could pave the way for personalised medication, where instead of getting a standard prescription, you get a specific drug tailormade for your individual body, that’s most likely to work for you.

And that applies to wider chemical processes too, such as new ways to produce fertilizers more efficiently, potentially a huge boost for global farmers.

Quantum sensors, which use the principles of quantum mechanics to measure things incredibly precisely, already exist and are found in atomic clocks.

In 2019, scientists at Nottingham University put them in a prototype device the size of a bike helmet, and used them in a new system to conduct non-intrusive brain scans on children with conditions such as epilepsy.

…

Trouble ahead?

Kleinman’s November 5, 2025 article examines one of the potential problems,

It is widely accepted that current forms of encryption – the way in which we store both personal data and official secrets – will one day be busted by quantum technology being able to churn through every single possible combination in record time, until the data becomes unscrambled.

Nations are known to be already stealing encrypted data from each other with a view to being able to decode it one day.

“It’s called harvest now, decrypt later,” says Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert from Surrey University [University of Surrey].

“The theory of how to break current forms of public key encryption await a truly operational quantum computer,” he adds.

“The threat is so high that it’s assumed everyone needs to introduce quantum-resistant encryption now.”

The moment a such a computer exists is sometimes referred to as Q-day. Estimates of when it might arrive vary, but Brian Hopkins at Forrester says it could be soon – around the year 2030.

Companies like Apple and the secure messaging platform Signal have already rolled out what they believe to be post-quantum encryption keys, but they cannot be applied retrospectively to current data encrypted in the traditional way.

…

If you have time, I recommend reading Kleinman’s November 5, 2025 article in its entirety.

What about our current level of privacy?

Valerie Fortney’s February 26, 2026 article for the National Post, “It’s the end of personal privacy. ‘There’s nowhere to hide anymore'”

By the time the Class of 2026 convenes this spring, the world will already know all sorts of personal details about these mostly 25-and-under university and college grads, things no one would have even thought to ask about the generations that preceded them.

Parents began trumpeting their arrivals on social media beginning in 2004, with baby steps and kindergarten performances chronicled on Facebook and, later, Instagram. Security cameras captured their first toddle into a grocery store. Today, they, and the rest of us, can be photographed and videoed without consent or even knowledge, from any one of the more than 12 million CCTV cameras or 30 million smartphones in use in Canada.

Some were introduced to computers and cellphones even before grade school, and it didn’t take long before they strapped on smart watches and logged on to social media. Even then, those convenient devices were collecting not just data but creating the start of full profiles — sometimes “anonymized,” sometimes not — for marketing and other purposes.

Even in the privacy of home, smart fridges were collecting data about the entire family’s eating routines, while smart TVs in living rooms “watched” them, tracking and cataloguing viewing habits. Today, Alexa listens in.

When those fresh-faced graduates apply for that first big job out of school, the odds are their prospective employers will have sifted through everything from social posts to search engines and even online gaming sites. And if you somehow stayed off-line and have no digital footprint at all? That could raise suspicion that you have something to hide.

In short, forget about personal privacy, everyone; it ain’t what it used to be. But do we still care? Should we?

…

Fortney’s February 26, 2026 article is an estimated 21 minute read.

Between the current state of privacy and Q Day, the future doesn’t look that good for anyone who prizes their privacy.

Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs

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I’ve been holding this one for a while and now, it seems like a good followup to yesterday’s, October 20, 2025 posting about “AI and the Art of Being Human,” which touches on co-writing and my October 13, 2025 posting and its mention of “Who’s afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences , and the Futures of Intelligence,” a conference and arts festival at the University of Toronto (scroll down to the “Who’s Afraid of AI …” subhead).

With the advent of some of the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and its use in creative content, the view on copyright (as a form of property) seems to be shifting. In putting this post together I’ve highlighted a blog posting that focuses on copyright and AI as it is commonly viewed. Following that piece, is a look at N. Katherine Hayles’ concept of AI as one of a number of cognitive assemblages and the implications of that concept where AI and copyright are concerned.

Then, it gets more complicated. What happens when your neural implant has an AI component? It’s question asked by members of a Canadian legal firm, McMillan LLP, a business law firm in their investigation of copyright. (The implication of this type of cognitive assemblage is not explicitly considered in Hayles’ work.) Following on the idea of a neural implant enhanced with AI, cyborg bugs (they too can have neural implants) are considered.

Uncomplicated vision of AI and copyright future

Glyn Moody’s May 15, 2025 posting on techdirt.com provides a very brief overview of the last 100 years of copyright and goes on to highlight some of the latest AI comments from tech industry titans, Note: Links have been removed,

For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good [emphasis mine], and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Despite that fact, recent attempts to halt the constant expansion and strengthening of copyright have all foundered. Part of the problem is that there has never been a constituency with enough political clout to counter the huge power of the copyright industry and its lobbyists.

Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world [emphasis mine]. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress [emphasis mine], and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential. …

…

In its own suggestions for the AI Action Plan, Google spells out what this means:

Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation. Balanced copyright laws that ensure access to publicly available scientific papers, for example, are essential for accelerating AI in science, particularly for applications that sift through scientific literature for insights or new hypotheses.

… some of the biggest personalities in the tech world have gone even further, reported here by TechCrunch:

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”

X’s current owner, Elon Musk, quickly replied, “I agree.”

It’s not clear what exactly brought these comments on, but they come at a time when AI companies, including OpenAI (which Musk co-founded, competes with, and is challenging in court), are facing numerous lawsuits alleging that they’ve violated copyright to train their models.

Unsurprisingly, that bold suggestion provoked howls of outrage from various players in the copyright world. That was to be expected. But the fact that big names like Musk and Dorsey were happy to cause such a storm is indicative of the changed atmosphere in the world of copyright and beyond. Indeed, there are signs that the other main intellectual monopolies – patents and trademarks – are also under pressure. Calling into question the old ways of doing things in these fields will also weaken the presumption that copyright must be preserved in its current state.

…

Yes, it is interesting to see tech moguls such as Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk take a more ‘enlightened’ approach to copyright. However, there may be a few twists and turns to this story as it continues to develop..

Copyright and cognitive assemblages

I need to set the stage with something coming from N. Katherine Hayles’ 2025 book “Bacteria to AI; Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts.” She suggests that we (humans) will be members in cognitive assemblages including bacteria, plants, cells, AI, and more. She then decouples cognition from consciousness and claims entities such as bacteria, etc. are capable of ‘nonconscious cognition’.

Hayles avoids the words ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’ by using cognition and providing this meaning for the word,

… “cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning” (Hayles 2017, 22 [in “Unthought: The power of the Cognitive Nonconscious”‘ University of Chicago Press]) Note: Hayles quotes herself on pp. 8-9 in 2025’s “Bacteria to AI ..”

Hayles then develops the notion of a cognitive assemblage made up of conscious (e.g. human) and nonconscious (e.g. AI agent) cognitions. The part that most interests me is where Hayles examines copyright and cognitive assemblages,

.. what happens to the whole idea of intellectual property when an AI has perused copyrighted works during its training and incorporated them into its general sense of how to produce a picture of X or a poem about Y. Already artists and stakeholders are confronting similar issues in the age of remixing and modifying existing content. how much of a picture, or a song, needs to be altered for it not to count as copyright infringement? As legal cases like this work their way through the courts, collective intelligence will doubt continue to spread through the cultures of developed countries, as more and more people come to rely on ChatGPT and similar models for more and more tasks. Thus our cultures edge toward the realization that the very idea of intellectual property as something owned by an individual who has exclusive rights to it may need to be rethought [emphasis mine] and reconceptualized on a basis consistent with the reality of collective intelligence [emphasis mine] and the pervasiveness of cognitive assemblages in producing products of value in the contemporary era. [pp. 226 – 227 in Hayles’ 2025 book, “Bacteria to AI …]

It certainly seems as if the notion of intellectual property as personal property is being seriously challenged (and not by academics alone) but this state of affairs may be temporary. In particular, the tech titans see a benefit to loosening the rules now but what happens if they see an advantage to tightening the rules?

Neurotechnology, AI, and copyright

Neuralink states clearly that AI is part of their (and presumably other company’s) products, from the “Neuralink and AI: Bridging the Gap Between Humans and Machines,” Note: Links have been removed,

The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and human cognition is no longer a distant sci-fi dream—it’s rapidly becoming reality. At the forefront of this revolution is Neuralink, a neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk in 2016, dedicated to creating brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that seamlessly connect the human brain to machines. With AI advancing at an unprecedented pace, Neuralink aims to bridge the gap between humans and technology, offering transformative possibilities for healthcare, communication, and even human evolution. In this article, we’ll explore how Neuralink and AI are reshaping our future, the science behind this innovation, its potential applications, and the ethical questions it raises.

…

Robbie Grant, Yue Fei, and Adelaide Egan (plus Articling Students: Aki Kamoshida and Sara Toufic) have given their April 17, 2025 article for McMillan LLP, a Canadian business law firm, a (I couldn’t resist the wordplay) ‘thought provoking’ title, “Who Owns a Thought? Navigating Legal Issues in Neurotech” for a very interesting read, Note 1: Links have been removed, Note 2: I’ve included the numbers for the footnotes but not the footnotes themselves,

The ongoing expansion of Neurotechnology (or “neurotech”) for consumers is raising questions related to privacy and ownership of one’s thoughts, as well as what will happen when technology can go beyond merely influencing humans and enter the realm of control {emphasis mine}.

Last year, a group of McGill students built a mind-controlled wheelchair in just 30 days.[1] Brain2Qwerty, Meta’s neuroscience project which translates brain activity into text, claims to allow for users to “type” with their minds.[2] Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk {emphasis mine}, is beginning clinical trials in Canada testing a fully wireless, remotely controllable device to be inserted into a user’s brain {emphasis mine}.[3] This comes several years after the company released a video of a monkey playing videogames with its mind using a similar implantable device.

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The authors have included a good description of neurotech, from their April 17, 2025 article,

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Neurotech refers to technology that records, analyzes or modifies the neurons in the human nervous system. Neurotech can be broken down into three subcategories:

    Neuroimaging: technology that monitors brain structure and function;

    Neuromodulation: technology that influences brain function; and

    Brain-Computer Interfaces or “BCIs”: technology that facilitates direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and an external device, sometimes referred to as brain-machine interfaces.[5]

In the medical and research context, neurotech has been deployed for decades in one form or another. Neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, MRI and PET have been used to study and analyze brain activity.[6] Neuromodulation has also been used for the treatment of various diseases, such as for deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease[7] as well as for cochlear implants.[8] However, the potential for applications of neurotech beyond medical devices is a newer development, accelerated by the arrival of less intrusive neurotech devices, and innovations in artificial intelligence.

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My interests here are not the same as the authors’, the focus in this posting is solely on intellectual property, from their April 17, 2025 article,

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3.  Intellectual Property

As neurotech continues to advance, it is possible that it will be able to make sense of complex, subconscious data such as dreams. This will present a host of novel IP challenges, which stem from the unique nature of the data being captured, the potential for the technology to generate new insights, and the fundamental questions about ownership and rights in a realm where personal thoughts become part of the technological process.

Ownership of Summarized Data: When neurotech is able to capture subconscious thoughts, [emphasis mine] it will likely process this data into summaries that reflect aspects of an individual’s mental state. The ownership of such summaries, however, can become contentious. On the one hand, it could be argued that the individual, as the originator of their thoughts, should own the summaries. On the other hand, one could argue that the summaries would not exist but for the processing done by the technology and hence the summaries should not be owned (or exclusively owned) by the individual. The challenge may be in determining whether the summary is a transformation of the data that makes it the product of the technology, or whether it remains simply a condensed version of the individual’s thoughts, in which case it makes sense for the individual to retain ownership.

Ownership of Creative Outputs: The situation becomes more complicated if the neurotech produces creative outputs based on the subconscious thoughts captured by the technology. For example, if the neurotech uses subconscious imagery or emotions to create art, music, or other works, who owns the rights to these works? Is the individual whose thoughts were analyzed the creator of the work, or does the technology, which has facilitated and interpreted those thoughts, hold some ownership? This issue is especially pertinent in a world where AI-generated creations are already challenging traditional ideas of IP ownership. For example, in many jurisdictions, ownership of copyrightable works is tied to the individual who conceived them.[27] Uncertainty can arise in cases where works are created with neurotech, where the individual whose thoughts are captured may not be aware of the process, or their thoughts may have been altered or combined with other information to produce the works. These uncertainties could have significant implications for IP ownership, compensation, and the extent to which individuals can control or profit from the thoughts embedded in their own subconscious minds.

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The reference to capturing data from subconscious thought and how that might be used in creative outputs is fascinating. This sounds like a description of one of Hayles’ cognitive assemblages with the complicating factor of a technology that is owned by a company. (Will Elon Musk be quite so cavalier about copyright when he could potentially own your thoughts and, consequently, your creative output?)

If you have the time (it’s an 11 minute read according to the authors), the whole April 17, 2025 article is worth it as the authors cover more issues (confidentiality, Health Canada oversight, etc.) than I have included here.

I also stumbled across the issue of neurotech tech companies and ownership of brain data (not copyright but you can see how this all begins to converge) in a February 29, 2024 posting “Portable and non-invasive (?) mind-reading AI (artificial intelligence) turns thoughts into text and some thoughts about the near future” where I featured this quote (scroll down about 70% of the way),

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Huth [Alexander Huth, assistant professor of Neuroscience and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin] and Tang [Jerry Tang, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas Austin] concluded that brain data, therefore, should be closely guarded, especially in the realm of consumer products. In an article on Medium from last April, Tang wrote that “decoding technology is continually improving, and the information that could be decoded from a brain scan a year from now may be very different from what can be decoded today. It is crucial that companies are transparent about what they intend to do with brain data and take measures to ensure that brain data is carefully protected.” (Yuste [Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscientist] said the Neurorights Foundation recently surveyed the user agreements of 30 neurotech companies and found that all of them claim ownership of users’ brain data — and most assert the right to sell that data to third parties. [emphases mine]) Despite these concerns, however, Huth and Tang maintained that the potential benefits of these technologies outweighed their risks, provided the proper guardrails [emphasis mine] were put in place.

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While I’m still with neurotech, there’s another aspect to be considered as noted in my April 5, 2022 posting “Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read).” My long read is probably 15 mins. or more.

Ending on a neurotech device/implant note, here’s a November 20, 2024 University Hospital Network (UHN) news release burbling happily about their new clinical trial involving Neurolink

UHN is proud to be selected as the first hospital in Canada to perform a pioneering neurosurgical procedure involving the Neuralink implantable device as part of the CAN-PRIME study, marking a significant milestone in the field of medical innovation.

This first procedure in Canada represents an exciting new research direction in neurosurgery and will involve the implantation of a wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) at UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital, the exclusive surgical site in Canada.

“We are incredibly proud to be at the forefront of this research advancement in neurosurgery,” says Dr. Kevin Smith, UHN’s President and CEO. “This progress is a testament to the dedication and expertise of our world-leading medical and research professionals, as well as our commitment to providing the most innovative and effective treatments for patients.

“As the first and exclusive surgical site in Canada to perform this procedure, we will be continuing to shape the future of neurological care and further defining our track record for doing what hasn’t been done.”

Neuralink has received Health Canada approval to begin recruiting for this clinical trial in Canada.

The goal of the CAN-PRIME Study (short for Canadian Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface), according to the study synopsis, is “to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with quadriplegia to control external devices with their thoughts [emphasis mine].”

Patients with limited or no ability to use both hands due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), may be eligible for the CAN-PRIME Study.

“This landmark surgery has the potential to transform and improve outcomes for patients who previously had limited options,” says Dr. Andres Lozano, the Alan and Susan Hudson Cornerstone Chair in Neurosurgery at UHN and lead of the CAN-PRIME study at UHN.

The procedure, which combines state-of-the-art technology and advanced surgical techniques, will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team of neurosurgeons, neuroscientists and medical experts at UHN.

“This is a perfect example of how scientific discovery, technological innovation, and clinical expertise come together to develop new approaches to continuously improve patient care,” says Dr. Brad Wouters, Executive Vice President of Science & Research at UHN. “As Canada’s No. 1 research hospital, we are proud to be leading this important trial in Canada that has the goal to improve the lives of individuals living with quadriplegia or ALS.”

The procedure has already generated significant attention within the medical community and further studies are planned to assess its long-term effectiveness and safety.

UHN is recognized for finding solutions beyond boundaries, achieving firsts and leading the development and implementation of the latest breakthroughs in health care to benefit patients across Canada, and around the world.

Not just human brains: cyborg bugs and other biohybrids

Brain-computer interfaces don’t have to be passively accepting instructions from humans, they could also be giving instructions to humans. I don’t have anything that makes the possibility explicit except by inference. For example, let’s look at cyborg bugs, from a May 13, 2025 article “We can turn bugs into flying, crawling RoboCops. Does that mean we should” by Carlyn Zwarenstein for salon.com, Note: Links have been removed,

Imagine a tiny fly-like drone with delicate translucent wings and multi-lensed eyes, scouting out enemies who won’t even notice it’s there. Or a substantial cockroach-like robot, off on a little trip to check out a nuclear accident, wearing a cute little backpack, fearless, regardless of what the Geiger counter says. These little engineered creatures might engage in search and rescue — surveillance, environmental or otherwise — inspecting dangerous areas you would not want to send a human being into, like a tunnel or building that could collapse at any moment, or a facility where there’s been a gas leak.

These robots are blazing new ethical terrain. That’s because they are not animals performing tasks for humans, nor are they robots that draw inspiration from nature. The drone that looks like a fly is both machine and bug. The Madagascar hissing cockroach robot doesn’t just perfectly mimic the attributes that allow cockroaches to withstand radiation and poisonous air: it is a real life animal, and it is also a mechanical creature controlled remotely. These are tiny cyborgs, though even tinier ones exist, involving microbes like bacteria or even a type of white blood cell. Like fictional police officer Alex Murphy who is remade into RoboCop, these real-life cyborgs act via algorithms rather than free will.

Even as the technology for the creation of biohybrids, of which cyborgs are just the most ethically fraught category, has advanced in leaps and bounds, separate research on animal consciousness has been revealing the basis for considering insects just as we might other animals. (If you look at a tree of life, you will see that insects are indeed animals and therefore share part of our evolutionary history: even our nervous systems are not completely alien to theirs). Do we have the right to turn insects into cyborgs that we can control to do our bidding, including our military bidding, if they feel pain or have preferences or anxieties?

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… the boundaries that keep an insect — a hawkmoth or cockroach, in one such project — under human control can be invisibly and automatically generated from the very backpack it wears, with researchers nudging it with neurostimulation pulses to guide it back within the boundaries of its invisible fence if it tries to stray away.

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As a society, you can’t really say we’ve spent significant time considering the ethics of taking a living creature and using it literally as a machine, although reporter Ariel Yu, reviewing some of the factors to take into account in a 2024 story inspired by the backpack-wearing roaches, framed the ethical dilemma not in terms of the use of an animal as a machine — you could say using an ox to pull a cart is doing that — but specifically the fact that we’re now able to take direct control of an animal’s nervous system. Though as a society we haven’t really talked this through either, within the field of bioengineering, researchers are giving it some attention.

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If it can be done to bugs and other creatures, why not us (ethics???)

The issues raised in Zwarenstein’s article could also be applied to humans. Given how I started this piece, ‘who owns a thought’ could become where did the thought come from? Could a brain-computer interface (BCI) enabled by AI be receiving thoughts from someone other than the person who has it implanted in their brain? And, if you’re the one with the BCI, how would you know? In short, could your BCI or other implant be hacked? That’s definitely a possibility researchers at Rice University (Texas, US) have prepared for according to my March 27, 2025 posting, “New security protocol to protect miniaturized wireless medical implants from cyberthreats.”

Even with no ‘interference’ and begging the question of corporate ownership, if all the thoughts weren’t ‘yours’, would you still be you?

Symbiosis and your implant

I have a striking excerpt from a September 17, 2020 post (Turning brain-controlled wireless electronic prostheses into reality plus some ethical points),

This was the most recent and most directly applicable work that I could find. From a July 24, 2019 article by Liam Drew for Nature Outlook: The brain,

“It becomes part of you,” Patient 6 said, describing the technology that enabled her, after 45 years of severe epilepsy, to halt her disabling seizures. Electrodes had been implanted on the surface of her brain that would send a signal to a hand-held device when they detected signs of impending epileptic activity. On hearing a warning from the device, Patient 6 knew to take a dose of medication to halt the coming seizure.

“You grow gradually into it and get used to it, so it then becomes a part of every day,” she told Frederic Gilbert, an ethicist who studies brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. “It became me,” she said. [emphasis mine]

Gilbert was interviewing six people who had participated in the first clinical trial of a predictive BCI to help understand how living with a computer that monitors brain activity directly affects individuals psychologically1. Patient 6’s experience was extreme: Gilbert describes her relationship with her BCI as a “radical symbiosis”.

Symbiosis is a term, borrowed from ecology, that means an intimate co-existence of two species for mutual advantage. As technologists work towards directly connecting the human brain to computers, it is increasingly being used to describe humans’ potential relationship with artificial intelligence.

Interface technologies are divided into those that ‘read’ the brain to record brain activity and decode its meaning, and those that ‘write’ to the brain to manipulate activity in specific regions and affect their function.

Commercial research is opaque, but scientists at social-media platform Facebook are known to be pursuing brain-reading techniques for use in headsets that would convert users’ brain activity into text. And neurotechnology companies such as Kernel in Los Angeles, California, and Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk in San Francisco, California, predict bidirectional coupling in which computers respond to people’s brain activity and insert information into their neural circuitry. [emphasis mine]

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This isn’t the first time I’ve used that excerpt or the first time I’ve waded into the ethics question regarding implants. For the curious, I mentioned the April 5, 2022 post “Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read)” earlier and there’s a February 23, 2024 post “Neural (brain) implants and hype (long read)” as well as others.

So, who does own a thought?

Hayles’ notion of assemblages puts into question the notion of a ‘self’ or, if you will, an ‘I’. (Segue: Hayles will be in Toronto for the Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences, and the Futures of Intelligence conference, October 23 – 24, 2025.) More questions have been raised with some of the older research about our relationships with AI: (1) see my December 3, 2021 posting “True love with AI (artificial intelligence): The Nature of Things explores emotional and creative AI (long read)” and newer research (2) see my upcoming post “A collaborating robot as part of your “extended” body.”

While I seem to have wandered into labyrinthine philosophical questions, I suspect lawyers will work towards more concrete definitions so that any questions that arise such as ‘who owns a thought’ can be argued and resolved in court.

Is your smart TV or your car spying on you?

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Simple answer: Yes.

Smart television sets (TVs)

A December 10, 2024 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid press release (also on EurekAlert) offers details about the data collected by smart TVs,

A scientific team from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), in collaboration with University College London (England) and the University of California, Davis (USA), has found that smart TVs send viewing data to their servers. This allows brands to generate detailed profiles of consumers’ habits and tailor advertisements based on their behaviour.

The research revealed that this technology captures screenshots or audio to identify the content displayed on the screen using Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology. This data is then periodically sent to specific servers, even when the TV is used as an external screen or connected to a laptop.

“Automatic Content Recognition works like a kind of visual Shazam, taking screenshots or audio to create a viewer profile based on their content consumption habits. This technology enables manufacturers’ platforms to profile users accurately, much like the internet does,” explains one of the study’s authors, Patricia Callejo, a professor in UC3M’s Department of Telematics Engineering and a fellow at the UC3M-Santander Big Data Institute. “In any case, this tracking—regardless of the usage mode—raises serious privacy concerns, especially when the TV is used solely as a monitor.”

The findings, presented in November [2024] at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024, highlight the frequency with which these screenshots are transmitted to the servers of the brands analysed: Samsung and LG. Specifically, the research showed that Samsung TVs sent this information every minute, while LG devices did so every 15 seconds. “This gives us an idea of the intensity of the monitoring and shows that smart TV platforms collect large volumes of data on users, regardless of how they consume content—whether through traditional TV viewing or devices connected via HDMI, like laptops or gaming consoles,” Callejo emphasises.

To test the ability of TVs to block ACR tracking, the research team experimented with various privacy settings on smart TVs. The results demonstrated that, while users can voluntarily block the transmission of this data to servers, the default setting is for TVs to perform ACR. “The problem is that not all users are aware of this,” adds Callejo, who considers this lack of transparency in initial settings concerning. “Moreover, many users don’t know how to change the settings, meaning these devices function by default as tracking mechanisms for their activity.”

This research opens up new avenues for studying the tracking capabilities of cloud-connected devices that communicate with each other (commonly known as the Internet of Things, or IoT). It also suggests that manufacturers and regulators must urgently address the challenges that these new devices will present in the near future.

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Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs by Gianluca Anselmi, Yash Vekaria, Alexander D’Souza, Patricia Callejo, Anna Maria Mandalari, Zubair Shafiq. IMC ’24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference Pages 622 – 634 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3646547.3689013 Published: 04 November 2024

This paper is open access.

Cars

This was on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Day Six radio programme and the segment is embedded in a January 19, 2025 article by Philip Drost, Note: A link has been removed,

When a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day [2025], authorities were quickly able to gather information, crediting Elon Musk and Tesla for sending them info about the car and its driver. 

But for some, it’s alarming to discover that kind of information is so readily available.

“Most carmakers are selling drivers’ personal information. That’s something that we know based on their privacy policies,” Zoë MacDonald, a writer and researcher focussing on online privacy and digital rights, told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said the Tesla CEO was able to provide key details about the truck’s driver, who authorities believe died by self-inflicted gun wound at the scene, and its movement leading up to the destination. 

With that data, they were able to determine that the explosives came from a device in the truck, not the vehicle itself.  

“We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself,” Musk wrote on X following the explosion.

To privacy experts, it’s another example of how your personal information can be used in ways you may not be aware of. And while this kind of data can useful in an investigation, it’s by no means the only way companies use the information.  

“This is unfortunately not surprising that they have this data,” said David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.

“When you see it all together and know that a company has that information and continues at any point in time to hand it over to law enforcement, then you start to be a little uncomfortable, even if — in this case — it was a good thing for society.”

CBC News reached out to Tesla for comment but did not hear back before publication. 

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I found this to be eye-opening, Note: A link has been removed,

MacDonald says the privacy concerns are a byproduct of all the technology new cars come with these days, including microphones, cameras, and sensors. The app that often accompanies a new car is collecting your information, too, she says.

The former writer for the Mozilla Foundation worked on a report in 2023 that examined vehicle privacy policies. For that study, MacDonald sifted through privacy policies from auto manufacturers. And she says the findings were staggering.

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Most shocking of all is the information the car can learn from you, MacDonald says. It’s not just when you gas up or start your engine. Your vehicle can learn your sexual activity, disability status, and even your religious beliefs [emphasis mine].

MacDonald says it’s unclear how they car companies do this, because the information in the policies are so vague.

It can also collect biometric data, such as facial geometric features, iris scans, and fingerprints [emphasis mine].

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This extends far past the driver. MacDonald says she read one privacy policy that required drivers to read out a statement every time someone entered the vehicle, to make them aware of the data the car collects, something that seems unlikely to go down before your Uber ride.

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If that doesn’t bother you, then this might, Note: A link has been removed,

And car companies aren’t just keeping that information to themselves.

Confronted with these types of privacy concerns, many people simply say they have nothing to hide, Choffnes says. But when money is involved, they change their tune. 

According to an investigation from the New York Times in March of 2024, General Motors shared information on how people drive their cars with data brokers that create risk profiles for the insurance industry, which resulted in people’s insurance premiums going up [emphases mine]. General Motors has since said it has stopped sharing those details [emphasis mine].

“The issue with these kinds of services is that it’s not clear that it is being done in a correct or fair way, and that those costs are actually unfair to consumers,” said Choffnes. 

For example, if you make a hard stop to avoid an accident because of something the car in front of you did, the vehicle could register it as poor driving.

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Drost’s January 19, 2025 article notes that the US Federal Trade Commission has proposed a five year moratorium to prevent General Motors from selling geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer report agencies. In the meantime,

“Cars are a privacy nightmare. And that is not a problem that Canadian consumers can solve or should solve or should have the burden to try to solve for themselves,” said MacDonald.

If you have the time, read Drost’s January 19, 2025 article and/or listen to the embedded radio segment.

Local resistance to Lomiko Metals’ Outaouais graphite mine

2 Replies

It’s been a while since BC-based Lomiko Metals has rated more than a passing mention here. Back in June 2024 the company experienced a rough patch regarding their plans to mine for graphite in one of their Québec mines, from a June 9, 2024 article by Joe Bongiorno for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news online,

In Quebec’s Laurentians region, a few kilometres from a wildlife reserve and just outside the town of Duhamel, lies a source of one of the world’s most sought after minerals for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries: graphite.

Since Lomiko Metals Inc., a mining company based in Surrey, B.C., announced plans to build a graphite mine in the area, some residents living nearby have protested the project, fearing the potential harm to the environment.

But opposition has only gained steam after locals found out last month that the [US] Pentagon is involved in the project.

In May, Lomiko announced it received a grant of $11.4 million from the U.S. Department of Defence and another $4.9 million from Natural Resources Canada to study the conversion of graphite into battery-grade material for powering electric vehicles.

In its own announcement, the Pentagon said Lomiko’s graphite will bolster North American energy supply chains and be used for “defence applications,” words that make Duhamel resident Louis Saint-Hilaire uneasy.

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Depending on how you view things, this is either good news for bad news in a September 17, 2024 news item on CBC news online, Note: Links have been removed,

Two Quebec cabinet ministers say the province will not fund a proposed graphite mine north of Gatineau because it doesn’t meet the government’s standards for local support.

B.C.-based Lomiko Metals has been testing samples from its La Loutre site near the town of Duhamel, which the company says on its project website has shown “excellent graphite properties” for making batteries.

Many nearby residents have been against the proposal for years due to a perceived threat to outdoor recreation and associated businesses. No environmental assessment of the site has been conducted.

La Loutre has drawn funding from the Canadian and American governments for its potential role in the switch from gas to electric vehicles and related drop in fossil fuel emissions, but Minister Responsible for the Outaouais Region Mathieu Lacombe said Monday [Sept4ember 16, 2024] the project lacks provincial support.

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Lacombe pointed to Premier François Legault indicating in 2022 that no mining project will be carried out without what’s referred to in the province as “social acceptability” — essentially, buy-in from affected communities.

Natural Resources Minister Blanchette Vézina said the company’s request for funding from Investissement Québec wouldn’t be successful because it lacks public support.

Lomiko Metals has not responded to requests from Radio-Canada for an interview. It’s not clear what the company will do next, or what will happen with a referendum on the project scheduled for November 2025.

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Embedded in the September 17, 2024 news item is a radio segment where an expert further dissects the implications of the news.

For anyone interested in graphite, I have a January 3, 2023 posting, “Making graphite from coal and a few graphite facts.” There have been some changes with the ‘graphite facts’ since the posting was published but most of the other information should still be valid.

Here are the updated facts from the Natural Resources Canada Graphite Facts webpage, which was updated March 1, 2024,

Graphite is a non-metallic mineral that has properties similar to metals, such as a good ability to conduct heat and electricity. Graphite occurs naturally or can be produced synthetically. Purified natural graphite has higher crystalline structure and offers better electrical and thermal conductivity than synthetic material.

Key facts

  • In 2022, global graphite mine production was about 1.3 million tonnes, a 15% increase from 2021.
  • Canadian natural graphite production comes from the Lac des Iles mine in Quebec.
  • Canada ranks as the sixth global producer of graphite with 13,000 tonnes of production in 2022.
  • Canada exported $22 million worth of natural graphite and $14 million worth of synthetic graphite globally in 2022, mostly to the United States.

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Production

The Lac des Iles mine in Quebec is the only mine in Canada that produced graphite in 2022 [emphasis mine]. However, many other companies are working on advancing graphite projects. Canada produced 13,000 tonnes of natural graphite in 2022, which was an increase from 2021 of 9,743 tonnes.

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International context

Global production and demand for graphite are anticipated to increase in the coming years, largely because of the use of graphite in the batteries of electric vehicles. In 2022, global consumption of graphite reached 3.8 million tonnes, compared to 3.6 million tonnes in 2021. Synthetic graphite accounted for about 56% of the graphite consumption, which was concentrated largely in Asia. North America consumes only 1% of global natural graphite, but almost 9% of synthetic graphite.

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Global mine production of graphite was 1.3 million tonnes in 2022, up 15% compared to the previous year. China is the leading global producer, accounting for 66% of production in 2022. Canada ranks sixth globally for natural graphite production, producing about 1% of global natural graphite.

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It seems Lomiko Metals’ La Loutre mine will not be adding to the country’s graphite production. I wonder what the company will do now as that La Loutre mine appears to be its chief asset, from a November 23, 2023 news release, Note: A link has been removed,

Montreal, Quebec – November 23, 2023 – Lomiko Metals Inc. (TSX.V: LMR) (“Lomiko Metals” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce the launch of a private placement (the “Private Placement“) to support the Company’s progress with its graphite and lithium projects in Quebec, Canada. The Private Placement will consist of hard dollar units for gross proceeds of up to $500,000.

Belinda Labatte, CEO and Director of Lomiko Metals: “Lomiko has accomplished many milestones in the last 18 months, including an updated Mineral Resource Estimate for La Loutre, environmental baseline studies and advancing the metallurgical studies. With this financing and committed investors, we will advance pre-feasibility level initiatives, and continue to advance the important discussions with communities, partners and First Nation Kitigan Zibi.”

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Retirement of Director

A special thank you and note of appreciation for Paul Gill, Executive Chair, who will not stand for re-election as he pursues other opportunities. We appreciate his service to the company and long-standing leadership at Lomiko. We wish him well in his future endeavours. Paul Gill will continue to serve as Executive Chair until the Company’s Annual and Special Meeting on December 20, 2023.

About Lomiko Metals Inc.

The Company holds mineral interests in its La Loutre graphite development in southern Quebec. The La Loutre project site is within the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg (KZA) First Nation’s territory. The KZA First Nation is part of the Algonquin Nation, and the KZA traditional territory is situated within the Outaouais and Laurentides regions.​ Located 180 kilometers northwest of Montreal, the property consists of one large, continuous block with 76 mineral claims totaling 4,528 hectares (45.3 km2).

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In addition to La Loutre, Lomiko is working with Critical Elements Lithium Corporation towards earning its 49% stake in the Bourier Project as per the option agreement announced on April 27th, 2021. The Bourier project site is located near Nemaska Lithium and Critical Elements south-east of the Eeyou Istchee James Bay territory in Quebec which consists of 203 claims, for a total ground position of 10,252.20 hectares (102.52 km2), in Canada’s lithium triangle near the James Bay region of Quebec that has historically housed lithium deposits and mineralization trends.

This is quite a setback for Lomiko Metals.

October 2024

It seems that while the company has regrouped it has entirely given up on La Loutre, from an October 30, 2024 news release,

October 30th, 2024 – Montreal, Québec: Lomiko Metals Inc. (TSX.V: LMR) (“Lomiko Metals” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce that the 2024 Beep-Map prospecting and sampling program is well underway on the Grenville Graphite Mineral Belt regional graphite exploration project.  The “Grenville” project includes 268 mineral claims covering 15,639 hectares on six blocks in the Laurentian region of Quebec, approximately 200 kilometers northwest of Montréal within a 100 km radius of the Company’s flagship La Loutre graphite project [emphasis mine].  The 2024 work is focused on following up on the very successful graphite results reported in the Company’s press release dated July 11, 2023.  To date, a total of 265 samples have been collected and submitted for analysis from the Dieppe, Meloche, Ruisseau and Tremblant properties, the focus of this campaign. No work is being conducted on the Carmin or North Low properties at this time.  The results of the exploration campaign will be reported as they become available.  The regional exploration program focuses on improving knowledge of graphite showings at the most prospective targets outlined in the 2022 and 2023 exploration programs.

Corporate and market update

Lomiko is part of the global transition to electrification and localization of transportation supply chains, a change that impacts all forms of transportation, cars, heavy equipment, marine etc. It also impacts communities and our talent pool to build these businesses of the future. Natural flake graphite, and specifically fine flake graphite, is crucial for the development of the North American anode industry in the new energy framework driven by tariffs on critical minerals, long-term supply chain resilience, and responsible domestic industrial growth. The La Loutre graphite is 67% fine flake distribution, making it an important source of long-term future graphite supply [emphasis mine] with demonstrated success for anode battery technology – among other uses currently being evaluated by Lomiko. According to Fortune Business Insights report dated October 14, 2024, the North American EV market is expected to grow almost quadruple to $230 billion in 2030 from $63 billion in 2022, with growth from other transportation sectors still nascent. Lomiko continues to engage with partners, customers and suppliers in building the future of this industry and developing R&D for the responsible extraction of this material.

Lomiko is initiating the reimbursement process for its recently awarded grant from the United States government and contribution agreement from the Canadian government, for work completed to date and within the scope of the agreements. It is the recipient of a Department of Defense (“DoD”) Technology Investment Agreement (“TIA”) grant of US$8.35 million (approximately CA$11.4 million) where Lomiko will match the funding over a period of 5 years, for a total agreement with the DoD of US$16.7 million. The grant falls under Title III of the Defense Production Act and is funded through the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure energy security in North America. The Company has also been approved for funding of CA$4.9 million in a non-repayable contribution agreement from the Critical Mineral Research, Development and Demonstration (CMRDD) program administered by Natural Resources Canada, with the total project cost being CA$6.6 million. The announcement was made on May 16, 2024 and can be viewed on our website at www.lomiko.com.

In addition, Lomiko announces the resignation of CFO and Corporate Secretary, Vince Osbourne, who will be pursuing a role with a private company and maintain a strategic advisory role with Lomiko going forward. Jacqueline Michael, Controller, will replace Vince Osbourne as CFO on an interim basis, with the role of Corporate Secretary to be assumed by current professionals working with Lomiko.

On behalf of the board of directors and management, Belinda Labatte, CEO and Interim Chair of the board of directors stated: “Vince has been an integral member of the Lomiko team, and we wish him success in his future endeavors, and we are pleased to continue our working relationship in his new capacity to Lomiko as advisor to the Company.”

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Now with a new administration entering the US White House has a chief advisor and co-leader of a new government agency [Department of Government Efficiency] in Elon Musk who is extremely wealthy and has many businesses, notably Tesla, an electronic vehicle (EV) business. It would seem that M. Musk might have an interest in easy access to minerals important to Tesla’s business.

I wonder how this is going to work out.

Recording brain activity with flexible tentacle electrodes

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A September 4, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily announced some research in Switzerland that improves on electrodes used in brain implants, e.g., like Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink,

Neurostimulators, also known as brain pacemakers, send electrical impulses to specific areas of the brain via special electrodes. It is estimated that some 200,000 people worldwide are now benefiting from this technology, including those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease or from pathological muscle spasms. According to Mehmet Fatih Yanik, Professor of Neurotechnology at ETH Zurich, further research will greatly expand the potential applications: instead of using them exclusively to stimulate the brain, the electrodes can also be used to precisely record brain activity and analyse it for anomalies associated with neurological or psychiatric disorders. In a second step, it would be conceivable in future to treat these anomalies and disorders using electrical impulses.

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A September 4, 2024 ETH Zurich press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more technical detail about the work,

To this end, Yanik and his team have now developed a new type of electrode that enables more detailed and more precise recordings of brain activity over an extended period of time. These electrodes are made of bundles of extremely fine and flexible fibres of electrically conductive gold encapsulated in a polymer. Thanks to a process developed by the ETH Zurich researchers, these bundles can be inserted into the brain very slowly, which is why they do not cause any detectable damage to brain tissue.

This sets the new electrodes apart from rival technologies. Of these, perhaps the best known in the public sphere is the one from Neuralink, an Elon Musk company [emphasis mine]. In all such systems, including Neuralink’s, the electrodes are considerably wider. “The wider the probe, even if it is flexible, the greater the risk of damage to brain tissue,” Yanik explains. “Our electrodes are so fine that they can be threaded past the long processes that extend from the nerve cells in the brain. They are only around as thick as the nerve-cell processes themselves.”

The research team tested the new electrodes on the brains of rats using four bundles, each made up of 64 fibres. In principle, as Yanik explains, up to several hundred electrode fibres could be used to investigate the activity of an even greater number of brain cells. In the study, the electrodes were connected to a small recording device attached to the head of each rat, thereby enabling them to move freely.

No influence on brain activity

In the experiments, the research team was able to confirm that the probes are biocompatible and that they do not influence brain function. Because the electrodes are very close to the nerve cells, the signal quality is very good compared to other methods.

At the same time, the probes are suitable for long-term monitoring activities, with researchers recording signals from the same cells in the brains of animals for the entire duration of a ten-month experiment. Examinations showed that no brain-tissue damage occurred during this time. A further advantage is that the bundles can branch out in different directions, meaning that they can reach multiple brain areas.

Human testing to begin soon

In the study, the researcher used the new electrodes to track and analyse nerve-cell activity in various areas of the brains of rats over a period of several months. They were able to determine that nerve cells in different regions were “co-activated”. Scientists believe that this large-scale, synchronous interaction of brain cells plays a key role in the processing of complex information and memory formation. “The technology is of high interest for basic research that investigates these functions and their impairments in neurological and psychiatric disorders,” Yanik explains.

The group has teamed up with fellow researchers at the University College London in order to test diagnostic use of the new electrodes in the human brain. Specifically, the project involves epilepsy sufferers who do not respond to drug therapy. In such cases, neurosurgeons may remove a small part of the brain where the seizures originate. The idea is to use the group’s method to precisely localise the affected area of the brain prior to tissue removal.

Brain-machine interfaces

There are also plans to use the new electrodes to stimulate brain cells in humans. “This could aid the development of more effective therapies for people with neurological and psychiatric disorders”, says Yanik. In disorders such as depression, schizophrenia or OCD, there is often impairments in specific regions of the brain, which leads to problems in evaluation of information and decision making. Using the new electrodes, it might be possible to detect the pathological signals generated by the neural networks in the brain in advance, and then stimulate the brain in a way that would alleviate such disorders. Yanik also thinks that this technology may give rise to brain-machine interfaces for people with brain injuries. In such cases, the electrodes might be used to read their intentions and thereby, for example, to control prosthetics or a voice-output system.

A bundle of extremely fine electrode fibres in the brain (microscope image). (Image: Yasar TB et al. Nature Communications 2024, modified) Courtesy: ETH Zurich

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Months-long tracking of neuronal ensembles spanning multiple brain areas with Ultra-Flexible Tentacle Electrodes by Tansel Baran Yasar, Peter Gombkoto, Alexei L. Vyssotski, Angeliki D. Vavladeli, Christopher M. Lewis, Bifeng Wu, Linus Meienberg, Valter Lundegardh, Fritjof Helmchen, Wolfger von der Behrens & Mehmet Fatih Yanik. Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 4822 (2024) DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49226-9 Published online: 06 June 2024

This paper is open access.

Neural (brain) implants and hype (long read)

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There was a big splash a few weeks ago when it was announced that Neuralink’s (Elon Musk company) brain implant had been surgically inserted into its first human patient.

Getting approval

David Tuffley, senior lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity at Griffith University (Australia), provides a good overview of the road Neuralink took to getting FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) approval for human clinical trials in his May 29, 2023 essay for The Conversation, Note: Links have been removed,

Since its founding in 2016, Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink has had the ambitious mission to build a next-generation brain implant with at least 100 times more brain connections than devices currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The company has now reached a significant milestone, having received FDA approval to begin human trials. So what were the issues keeping the technology in the pre-clinical trial phase for as long as it was? And have these concerns been addressed?

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Neuralink is making a Class III medical device known as a brain-computer interface (BCI). The device connects the brain to an external computer via a Bluetooth signal, enabling continuous communication back and forth.

The device itself is a coin-sized unit called a Link. It’s implanted within a small disk-shaped cutout in the skull using a precision surgical robot. The robot splices a thousand tiny threads from the Link to certain neurons in the brain. [emphasis mine] Each thread is about a quarter the diameter of a human hair.

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The company says the device could enable precise control of prosthetic limbs, giving amputees natural motor skills. It could revolutionise treatment for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and spinal cord injuries. It also shows some promise for potential treatment of obesity, autism, depression, schizophrenia and tinnitus.

Several other neurotechnology companies and researchers have already developed BCI technologies that have helped people with limited mobility regain movement and complete daily tasks.

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In February 2021, Musk said Neuralink was working with the FDA to secure permission to start initial human trials later that year. But human trials didn’t commence in 2021.

Then, in March 2022, Neuralink made a further application to the FDA to establish its readiness to begin humans trials.

One year and three months later, on May 25 2023, Neuralink finally received FDA approval for its first human clinical trial. Given how hard Neuralink has pushed for permission to begin, we can assume it will begin very soon. [emphasis mine]

The approval has come less than six months after the US Office of the Inspector General launched an investigation into Neuralink over potential animal welfare violations. [emphasis mine]

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In accessible language, Tuffley goes on to discuss the FDA’s specific technical issues with implants and how they were addressed in his May 29, 2023 essay.

More about how Neuralink’s implant works and some concerns

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) journalist Andrew Chang offers an almost 13 minute video, “Neuralink brain chip’s first human patient. How does it work?” Chang is a little overenthused for my taste but he offers some good information about neural implants, along with informative graphics in his presentation.

So, Tuffley was right about Neuralink getting ready quickly for human clinical trials as you can guess from the title of Chang’s CBC video.

Jennifer Korn announced that recruitment had started in her September 20, 2023 article for CNN (Cable News Network), Note: Links have been removed,

Elon Musk’s controversial biotechnology startup Neuralink opened up recruitment for its first human clinical trial Tuesday, according to a company blog.

After receiving approval from an independent review board, Neuralink is set to begin offering brain implants to paralysis patients as part of the PRIME Study, the company said. PRIME, short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, is being carried out to evaluate both the safety and functionality of the implant.

Trial patients will have a chip surgically placed in the part of the brain that controls the intention to move. The chip, installed by a robot, will then record and send brain signals to an app, with the initial goal being “to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone,” the company wrote.

Those with quadriplegia [sometimes known as tetraplegia] due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) may qualify for the six-year-long study – 18 months of at-home and clinic visits followed by follow-up visits over five years. Interested people can sign up in the patient registry on Neuralink’s website.

Musk has been working on Neuralink’s goal of using implants to connect the human brain to a computer for five years, but the company so far has only tested on animals. The company also faced scrutiny after a monkey died in project testing in 2022 as part of efforts to get the animal to play Pong, one of the first video games.

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I mentioned three Reuters investigative journalists who were reporting on Neuralink’s animal abuse allegations (emphasized in Tuffley’s essay) in a July 7, 2023 posting, “Global dialogue on the ethics of neurotechnology on July 13, 2023 led by UNESCO.” Later that year, Neuralink was cleared by the US Department of Agriculture (see September 24,, 2023 article by Mahnoor Jehangir for BNN Breaking).

Plus, Neuralink was being investigated over more allegations according to a February 9, 2023 article by Rachel Levy for Reuters, this time regarding hazardous pathogens,

The U.S. Department of Transportation said on Thursday it is investigating Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink over the potentially illegal movement of hazardous pathogens.

A Department of Transportation spokesperson told Reuters about the probe after the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-welfare advocacy group,wrote to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, opens new tab earlier on Thursday to alert it of records it obtained on the matter.

PCRM said it obtained emails and other documents that suggest unsafe packaging and movement of implants removed from the brains of monkeys. These implants may have carried infectious diseases in violation of federal law, PCRM said.

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There’s an update about the hazardous materials in the next section. Spoiler alert, the company got fined.

Neuralink’s first human implant

A January 30, 2024 article (Associated Press with files from Reuters) on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) online news webspace heralded the latest about Neurlink’s human clinical trials,

The first human patient received an implant from Elon Musk’s computer-brain interface company Neuralink over the weekend, the billionaire says.

In a post Monday [January 29, 2024] on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk said that the patient received the implant the day prior and was “recovering well.” He added that “initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”

Spikes are activity by neurons, which the National Institutes of Health describe as cells that use electrical and chemical signals to send information around the brain and to the body.

The billionaire, who owns X and co-founded Neuralink, did not provide additional details about the patient.

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When Neuralink announced in September [2023] that it would begin recruiting people, the company said it was searching for individuals with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

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Neuralink reposted Musk’s Monday [January 29, 2024] post on X, but did not publish any additional statements acknowledging the human implant. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press or Reuters on Tuesday [January 30, 2024].

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In a separate Monday [January 29, 2024] post on X, Musk said that the first Neuralink product is called “Telepathy” — which, he said, will enable users to control their phones or computers “just by thinking.” He said initial users would be those who have lost use of their limbs.

The startup’s PRIME Study is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot.

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Now for the hazardous materials, January 30, 2024 article, Note: A link has been removed,

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Earlier this month [January 2024], a Reuters investigation found that Neuralink was fined for violating U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) rules regarding the movement of hazardous materials. During inspections of the company’s facilities in Texas and California in February 2023, DOT investigators found the company had failed to register itself as a transporter of hazardous material.

They also found improper packaging of hazardous waste, including the flammable liquid Xylene. Xylene can cause headaches, dizziness, confusion, loss of muscle co-ordination and even death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The records do not say why Neuralink would need to transport hazardous materials or whether any harm resulted from the violations.

Skeptical thoughts about Elon Musk and Neuralink

Earlier this month (February 2024), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) published an article by health reporters, Jim Reed and Joe McFadden, that highlights the history of brain implants, the possibilities, and notes some of Elon Musk’s more outrageous claims for Neuralink’s brain implants,

Elon Musk is no stranger to bold claims – from his plans to colonise Mars to his dreams of building transport links underneath our biggest cities. This week the world’s richest man said his Neuralink division had successfully implanted its first wireless brain chip into a human.

Is he right when he says this technology could – in the long term – save the human race itself?

Sticking electrodes into brain tissue is really nothing new.

In the 1960s and 70s electrical stimulation was used to trigger or suppress aggressive behaviour in cats. By the early 2000s monkeys were being trained to move a cursor around a computer screen using just their thoughts.

“It’s nothing novel, but implantable technology takes a long time to mature, and reach a stage where companies have all the pieces of the puzzle, and can really start to put them together,” says Anne Vanhoestenberghe, professor of active implantable medical devices, at King’s College London.

Neuralink is one of a growing number of companies and university departments attempting to refine and ultimately commercialise this technology. The focus, at least to start with, is on paralysis and the treatment of complex neurological conditions.

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Reed and McFadden’s February 2024 BBC article describes a few of the other brain implant efforts, Note: Links have been removed,

One of its [Neuralink’s] main rivals, a start-up called Synchron backed by funding from investment firms controlled by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, has already implanted its stent-like device into 10 patients.

Back in December 2021, Philip O’Keefe, a 62-year old Australian who lives with a form of motor neurone disease, composed the first tweet using just his thoughts to control a cursor.

And researchers at Lausanne University in Switzerland have shown it is possible for a paralysed man to walk again by implanting multiple devices to bypass damage caused by a cycling accident.

In a research paper published this year, they demonstrated a signal could be beamed down from a device in his brain to a second device implanted at the base of his spine, which could then trigger his limbs to move.

Some people living with spinal injuries are sceptical about the sudden interest in this new kind of technology.

“These breakthroughs get announced time and time again and don’t seem to be getting any further along,” says Glyn Hayes, who was paralysed in a motorbike accident in 2017, and now runs public affairs for the Spinal Injuries Association.

“If I could have anything back, it wouldn’t be the ability to walk. It would be putting more money into a way of removing nerve pain, for example, or ways to improve bowel, bladder and sexual function.” [emphasis mine]

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Musk, however, is focused on something far more grand for Neuralink implants, from Reed and McFadden’s February 2024 BBC article, Note: A link has been removed,

But for Elon Musk, “solving” brain and spinal injuries is just the first step for Neuralink.

The longer-term goal is “human/AI symbiosis” [emphasis mine], something he describes as “species-level important”.

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Musk himself has already talked about a future where his device could allow people to communicate with a phone or computer “faster than a speed typist or auctioneer”.

In the past, he has even said saving and replaying memories may be possible, although he recognised “this is sounding increasingly like a Black Mirror episode.”

One of the experts quoted in Reed and McFadden’s February 2024 BBC article asks a pointed question,

… “At the moment, I’m struggling to see an application that a consumer would benefit from, where they would take the risk of invasive surgery,” says Prof Vanhoestenberghe.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, would you risk brain surgery just to be able to order a pizza on your phone?”

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Rae Hodge’s February 11, 2024 article about Elon Musk and his hyped up Neuralink implant for Salon is worth reading in its entirety but for those who don’t have the time or need a little persuading, here are a few excerpts, Note 1: This is a warning; Hodge provides more detail about the animal cruelty allegations; Note 2: Links have been removed,

Elon Musk’s controversial brain-computer interface (BCI) tech, Neuralink, has supposedly been implanted in its first recipient — and as much as I want to see progress for treatment of paralysis and neurodegenerative disease, I’m not celebrating. I bet the neuroscientists he reportedly drove out of the company aren’t either, especially not after seeing the gruesome torture of test monkeys and apparent cover-up that paved the way for this moment. 

All of which is an ethics horror show on its own. But the timing of Musk’s overhyped implant announcement gives it an additional insulting subtext. Football players are currently in a battle for their lives against concussion-based brain diseases that plague autopsy reports of former NFL players. And Musk’s boast of false hope came just two weeks before living players take the field in the biggest and most brutal game of the year. [2024 Super Bowl LVIII]

ESPN’s Kevin Seifert reports neuro-damage is up this year as “players suffered a total of 52 concussions from the start of training camp to the beginning of the regular season. The combined total of 213 preseason and regular season concussions was 14% higher than 2021 but within range of the three-year average from 2018 to 2020 (203).”

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I’m a big fan of body-tech: pacemakers, 3D-printed hips and prosthetic limbs that allow you to wear your wedding ring again after 17 years. Same for brain chips. But BCI is the slow-moving front of body-tech development for good reason. The brain is too understudied. Consequences of the wrong move are dire. Overpromising marketable results on profit-driven timelines — on the backs of such a small community of researchers in a relatively new field — would be either idiotic or fiendish. 

Brown University’s research in the sector goes back to the 1990s. Since the emergence of a floodgate-opening 2002 study and the first implant in 2004 by med-tech company BrainGate, more promising results have inspired broader investment into careful research. But BrainGate’s clinical trials started back in 2009, and as noted by Business Insider’s Hilary Brueck, are expected to continue until 2038 — with only 15 participants who have devices installed. 

Anne Vanhoestenberghe is a professor of active implantable medical devices at King’s College London. In a recent release, she cautioned against the kind of hype peddled by Musk.

“Whilst there are a few other companies already using their devices in humans and the neuroscience community have made remarkable achievements with those devices, the potential benefits are still significantly limited by technology,” she said. “Developing and validating core technology for long term use in humans takes time and we need more investments to ensure we do the work that will underpin the next generation of BCIs.” 

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Neuralink is a metal coin in your head that connects to something as flimsy as an app. And we’ve seen how Elon treats those. We’ve also seen corporate goons steal a veteran’s prosthetic legs — and companies turn brain surgeons and dentists into repo-men by having them yank anti-epilepsy chips out of people’s skulls, and dentures out of their mouths. 

“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury,” Musk said at a 2023 tech summit, adding that the chip could possibly “make up for whatever lost capacity somebody has.”

Maybe BCI can. But only in the careful hands of scientists who don’t have Musk squawking “go faster!” over their shoulders. His greedy frustration with the speed of BCI science is telling, as is the animal cruelty it reportedly prompted.

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There have been other examples of Musk’s grandiosity. Notably, David Lee expressed skepticism about hyperloop in his August 13, 2013 article for BBC news online

Is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop just a pipe dream?

Much like the pun in the headline, the bright idea of transporting people using some kind of vacuum-like tube is neither new nor imaginative.

There was Robert Goddard, considered the “father of modern rocket propulsion”, who claimed in 1909 that his vacuum system could suck passengers from Boston to New York at 1,200mph.

And then there were Soviet plans for an amphibious monorail  – mooted in 1934  – in which two long pods would start their journey attached to a metal track before flying off the end and slipping into the water like a two-fingered Kit Kat dropped into some tea.

So ever since inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk hit the world’s media with his plans for the Hyperloop, a healthy dose of scepticism has been in the air.

“This is by no means a new idea,” says Rod Muttram, formerly of Bombardier Transportation and Railtrack.

“It has been previously suggested as a possible transatlantic transport system. The only novel feature I see is the proposal to put the tubes above existing roads.”

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Here’s the latest I’ve found on hyperloop, from the Hyperloop Wikipedia entry,

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As of 2024, some companies continued to pursue technology development under the hyperloop moniker, however, one of the biggest, well funded players, Hyperloop One, declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in 2023.[15]

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Musk is impatient and impulsive as noted in a September 12, 2023 posting by Mike Masnick on Techdirt, Note: A link has been removed,

The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center

Back on Christmas Eve [December 24, 2022] of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees were quoted about how much work it would be to do that cleanly, noting that there’s a ton of stuff hardcoded in Twitter code referring to that data center (hold that thought).

That same day, Elon tweeted out that he had “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.”

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Masnick follows with a story of reckless behaviour from someone who should have known better.

Ethics of implants—where to look for more information

While Musk doesn’t use the term when he describes a “human/AI symbiosis” (presumably by way of a neural implant), he’s talking about a cyborg. Here’s a 2018 paper, which looks at some of the implications,

Do you want to be a cyborg? The moderating effect of ethics on neural implant acceptance by Eva Reinares-Lara, Cristina Olarte-Pascual, and Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo. Computers in Human Behavior Volume 85, August 2018, Pages 43-53 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.03.032

This paper is open access.

Getting back to Neuralink, I have two blog posts that discuss the company and the ethics of brain implants from way back in 2021.

First, there’s Jazzy Benes’ March 1, 2021 posting on the Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics blog. It stands out as it includes a discussion of the disabled community’s issues, Note: Links have been removed,

In the heart of Silicon Valley we are constantly enticed by the newest technological advances. With the big influencers Grimes [a Canadian musician and the mother of three children with Elon Musk] and Lil Uzi Vert publicly announcing their willingness to become experimental subjects for Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implantation device, we are left wondering if future technology will actually give us “the knowledge of the Gods.” Is it part of the natural order for humans to become omniscient beings? Who will have access to the devices? What other ethical considerations must be discussed before releasing such technology to the public?

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A significant issue that arises from developing technologies for the disabled community is the assumption that disabled persons desire the abilities of what some abled individuals may define as “normal.” Individuals with disabilities may object to technologies intended to make them fit an able-bodied norm. “Normal” is relative to each individual, and it could be potentially harmful to use a deficit view of disability, which means judging a disability as a deficiency. However, this is not to say that all disabled individuals will reject a technology that may enhance their abilities. Instead, I believe it is a consideration that must be recognized when developing technologies for the disabled community, and it can only be addressed through communication with disabled persons. As a result, I believe this is a conversation that must be had with the community for whom the technology is developed–disabled persons.

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With technologies that aim to address disabilities, we walk a fine line between therapeutics and enhancement. Though not the first neural implant medical device, the Link may have been the first BCI system openly discussed for its potential transhumanism uses, such as “enhanced cognitive abilities, memory storage and retrieval, gaming, telepathy, and even symbiosis with machines.” …

Benes also discusses transhumanism, privacy issues, and consent issues. It’s a thoughtful reading experience.

Second is a July 9, 2021 posting by anonymous on the University of California at Berkeley School of Information blog which provides more insight into privacy and other issues associated with data collection (and introduced me to the concept of decisional interference),

As the development of microchips furthers and advances in neuroscience occur, the possibility for seamless brain-machine interfaces, where a device decodes inputs from the user’s brain to perform functions, becomes more of a reality. These various forms of these technologies already exist. However, technological advances have made implantable and portable devices possible. Imagine a future where humans don’t need to talk to each other, but rather can transmit their thoughts directly to another person. This idea is the eventual goal of Elon Musk, the founder of Neuralink. Currently, Neuralink is one of the main companies involved in the advancement of this type of technology. Analysis of the Neuralink’s technology and their overall mission statement provide an interesting insight into the future of this type of human-computer interface and the potential privacy and ethical concerns with this technology.

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As this technology further develops, several privacy and ethical concerns come into question. To begin, using Solove’s Taxonomy as a privacy framework, many areas of potential harm are revealed. In the realm of information collection, there is much risk. Brain-computer interfaces, depending on where they are implanted, could have access to people’s most private thoughts and emotions. This information would need to be transmitted to another device for processing. The collection of this information by companies such as advertisers would represent a major breach of privacy. Additionally, there is risk to the user from information processing. These devices must work concurrently with other devices and often wirelessly. Given the widespread importance of cloud computing in much of today’s technology, offloading information from these devices to the cloud would be likely. Having the data stored in a database puts the user at the risk of secondary use if proper privacy policies are not implemented. The trove of information stored within the information collected from the brain is vast. These datasets could be combined with existing databases such as browsing history on Google to provide third parties with unimaginable context on individuals. Lastly, there is risk for information dissemination, more specifically, exposure. The information collected and processed by these devices would need to be stored digitally. Keeping such private information, even if anonymized, would be a huge potential for harm, as the contents of the information may in itself be re-identifiable to a specific individual. Lastly there is risk for invasions such as decisional interference. Brain-machine interfaces would not only be able to read information in the brain but also write information. This would allow the device to make potential emotional changes in its users, which be a major example of decisional interference. …

For the most recent Neuralink and brain implant ethics piece, there’s this February 14, 2024 essay on The Conversation, which, unusually, for this publication was solicited by the editors, Note: Links have been removed,

In January 2024, Musk announced that Neuralink implanted its first chip in a human subject’s brain. The Conversation reached out to two scholars at the University of Washington School of Medicine – Nancy Jecker, a bioethicst, and Andrew Ko, a neurosurgeon who implants brain chip devices – for their thoughts on the ethics of this new horizon in neuroscience.

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Information about the implant, however, is scarce, aside from a brochure aimed at recruiting trial subjects. Neuralink did not register at ClinicalTrials.gov, as is customary, and required by some academic journals. [all emphases mine]

Some scientists are troubled by this lack of transparency. Sharing information about clinical trials is important because it helps other investigators learn about areas related to their research and can improve patient care. Academic journals can also be biased toward positive results, preventing researchers from learning from unsuccessful experiments.

Fellows at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, have warned that Musk’s brand of “science by press release, while increasingly common, is not science. [emphases mine]” They advise against relying on someone with a huge financial stake in a research outcome to function as the sole source of information.

When scientific research is funded by government agencies or philanthropic groups, its aim is to promote the public good. Neuralink, on the other hand, embodies a private equity model [emphasis mine], which is becoming more common in science. Firms pooling funds from private investors to back science breakthroughs may strive to do good, but they also strive to maximize profits, which can conflict with patients’ best interests.

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated animal cruelty at Neuralink, according to a Reuters report, after employees accused the company of rushing tests and botching procedures on test animals in a race for results. The agency’s inspection found no breaches, according to a letter from the USDA secretary to lawmakers, which Reuters reviewed. However, the secretary did note an “adverse surgical event” in 2019 that Neuralink had self-reported.

In a separate incident also reported by Reuters, the Department of Transportation fined Neuralink for violating rules about transporting hazardous materials, including a flammable liquid.

…

…the possibility that the device could be increasingly shown to be helpful for people with disabilities, but become unavailable due to loss of research funding. For patients whose access to a device is tied to a research study, the prospect of losing access after the study ends can be devastating. [emphasis mine] This raises thorny questions about whether it is ever ethical to provide early access to breakthrough medical interventions prior to their receiving full FDA approval.

Not registering a clinical trial would seem to suggest there won’t be much oversight. As for Musk’s “science by press release” activities, I hope those will be treated with more skepticism by mainstream media although that seems unlikely given the current situation with journalism (more about that in a future post).

As for the issues associated with private equity models for science research and the problem of losing access to devices after a clinical trial is ended, my April 5, 2022 posting, “Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read)” offers some cautionary tales, in addition to being the most comprehensive piece I’ve published on ethics and brain implants.

My July 17, 2023 posting, “Unveiling the Neurotechnology Landscape: Scientific Advancements, Innovations and Major Trends—a UNESCO report” offers a brief overview of the international scene.

UK AI Summit (November 1 – 2, 2023) at Bletchley Park finishes

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This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to writing a gossip column (see my October 18, 2023 posting and scroll down to the “Insight into political jockeying [i.e., some juicy news bits]” subhead )for the first half.

Given the role that Canadian researchers (for more about that see my May 25, 2023 posting and scroll down to “The Panic” subhead) have played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s been surprising that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has given very little coverage to the event in the UK. However, there is an October 31, 2023 article by Kelvin Chang and Jill Lawless for the Associated Press posted on the CBC website,

Digital officials, tech company bosses and researchers are converging Wednesday [November 1, 2023] at a former codebreaking spy base [Bletchley Park] near London [UK] to discuss and better understand the extreme risks posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

The two-day summit focusing on so-called frontier AI notched up an early achievement with officials from 28 nations and the European Union signing an agreement on safe and responsible development of the technology.

Frontier AI is shorthand for the latest and most powerful general purpose systems that take the technology right up to its limits, but could come with as-yet-unknown dangers. They’re underpinned by foundation models, which power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and are trained on vast pools of information scraped from the internet.

The AI Safety Summit is a labour of love for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a tech-loving former banker who wants the U.K. to be a hub for computing innovation and has framed the summit as the start of a global conversation about the safe development of AI.[emphasis mine]

But U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris may divert attention Wednesday [November 1, 2023] with a separate speech in London setting out the Biden administration’s more hands-on approach.

…

Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne said AI would not be constrained by national borders, and therefore interoperability between different regulations being put in place was important.

…

As the meeting began, U.K. Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan announced that the 28 countries and the European Union had signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety. It outlines the “urgent need to understand and collectively manage potential risks through a new joint global effort.”

South Korea has agreed to host a mini virtual AI summit in six months, followed by an in-person one in France in a year’s time, the U.K. government said.

…

Chris Stokel-Walker’s October 31, 2023 article for Fast Company presents a critique of the summit prior to the opening, Note: Links have been removed,

…

… one problem, critics say: The summit, which begins on November 1, is too insular and its participants are homogeneous—an especially damning critique for something that’s trying to tackle the huge, possibly intractable questions around AI. The guest list is made up of 100 of the great and good of governments, including representatives from China, Europe, and Vice President Kamala Harris. And it also includes luminaries within the tech sector. But precious few others—which means a lack of diversity in discussions about the impact of AI.

“Self-regulation didn’t work for social media companies, it didn’t work for the finance sector, and it won’t work for AI,” says Carsten Jung, a senior economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank that recently published a report advising on key policy pillars it believes should be discussed at the summit. (Jung isn’t on the guest list.) “We need to learn lessons from our past mistakes and create a strong supervisory hub for all things AI, right from the start.”

Kriti Sharma, chief product officer for legal tech at Thomson Reuters, who will be watching from the wings, not receiving an invite, is similarly circumspect about the goals of the summit. “I hope to see leaders moving past the doom to take practical steps to address known issues and concerns in AI, giving businesses the clarity they urgently need,” she says. “Ideally, I’d like to see movement towards putting some fundamental AI guardrails in place, in the form of a globally aligned, cross-industry regulatory framework.”

But it’s uncertain whether the summit will indeed discuss the more practical elements of AI. Already it seems as if the gathering is designed to quell public fears around AI while convincing those developing AI products that the U.K. will not take too strong an approach in regulating the technology, perhaps in contrasts to near neighbors in the European Union, who have been open about their plans to ensure the technology is properly fenced in to ensure user safety.

…

Already, there are suggestions that the summit has been drastically downscaled in its ambitions, with others, including the United States, where President Biden just announced a sweeping executive order on AI, and the United Nations, which announced its AI advisory board last week.

Ingrid Lunden in her October 31, 2023 article for TechCrunch is more blunt,

…

As we wrote yesterday, the U.K. is partly using this event — the first of its kind, as it has pointed out — to stake out a territory for itself on the AI map — both as a place to build AI businesses, but also as an authority in the overall field.

That, coupled with the fact that the topics and approach are focused on potential issues, the affair feel like one very grand photo opportunity and PR exercise, a way for the government to show itself off in the most positive way at the same time that it slides down in the polls and it also faces a disastrous, bad-look inquiry into how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the U.K. does have the credentials for a seat at the table, so if the government is playing a hand here, it’s able to do it because its cards are strong.

The subsequent guest list, predictably, leans more toward organizations and attendees from the U.K. It’s also almost as revealing to see who is not participating.

…

Lunden’s October 30, 2023 article “Existential risk? Regulatory capture? AI for one and all? A look at what’s going on with AI in the UK” includes a little ‘inside’ information,

…

That high-level aspiration is also reflected in who is taking part: top-level government officials, captains of industry, and notable thinkers in the space are among those expected to attend. (Latest late entry: Elon Musk; latest no’s reportedly include President Biden, Justin Trudeau and Olaf Scholz.) [Scholz’s no was mentioned in my my October 18, 2023 posting]

It sounds exclusive, and it is: “Golden tickets” (as Azeem Azhar, a London-based tech founder and writer, describes them) to the Summit are in scarce supply. Conversations will be small and mostly closed. So because nature abhors a vacuum, a whole raft of other events and news developments have sprung up around the Summit, looping in the many other issues and stakeholders at play. These have included talks at the Royal Society (the U.K.’s national academy of sciences); a big “AI Fringe” conference that’s being held across multiple cities all week; many announcements of task forces; and more.

…

Earlier today, a group of 100 trade unions and rights campaigners sent a letter to the prime minister saying that the government is “squeezing out” their voices in the conversation by not having them be a part of the Bletchley Park event. (They may not have gotten their golden tickets, but they were definitely canny how they objected: The group publicized its letter by sharing it with no less than the Financial Times, the most elite of economic publications in the country.)

And normal people are not the only ones who have been snubbed. “None of the people I know have been invited,” Carissa Véliz, a tutor in philosophy at the University of Oxford, said during one of the AI Fringe events today [October 30, 2023].

…

More broadly, the summit has become an anchor and only one part of the bigger conversation going on right now. Last week, U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak outlined an intention to launch a new AI safety institute and a research network in the U.K. to put more time and thought into AI implications; a group of prominent academics, led by Yoshua Bengio [University of Montreal, Canada) and Geoffrey Hinton [University of Toronto, Canada], published a paper called “Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress” to put their collective oar into the the waters; and the UN announced its own task force to explore the implications of AI. Today [October 30, 2023], U.S. president Joe Biden issued the country’s own executive order to set standards for AI security and safety.

There are a couple more articles* from the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) covering the start of the summit, a November 1, 2023 article by Zoe Kleinman & Tom Gerken, “King Charles: Tackle AI risks with urgency and unity” and another November 1, 2023 article this time by Tom Gerken & Imran Rahman-Jones, “Rishi Sunak: AI firms cannot ‘mark their own homework‘.”

Politico offers more US-centric coverage of the event with a November 1, 2023 article by Mark Scott, Tom Bristow and Gian Volpicelli, “US and China join global leaders to lay out need for AI rulemaking,” a November 1, 2023 article by Vincent Manancourt and Eugene Daniels, “Kamala Harris seizes agenda as Rishi Sunak’s AI summit kicks off,” and a November 1, 2023 article by Vincent Manancourt, Eugene Daniels and Brendan Bordelon, “‘Existential to who[m]?’ US VP Kamala Harris urges focus on near-term AI risks.”

I want to draw special attention to the second Politico article,

Kamala just showed Rishi who’s boss.

As British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s showpiece artificial intelligence event kicked off in Bletchley Park on Wednesday, 50 miles south in the futuristic environs of the American Embassy in London, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her vision for how the world should govern artificial intelligence.

It was a raw show of U.S. power on the emerging technology.

…

Did she or was this an aggressive interpretation of events?

*’article’ changed to ‘articles’ on January 17, 2024.

Ethical nanobiotechnology

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This paper on ethics (aside: I have a few comments after the news release and citation) comes from the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) according to a July 12, 2023 news item on phys.org,

Prosthetics moved by thoughts. Targeted treatments for aggressive brain cancer. Soldiers with enhanced vision or bionic ears. These powerful technologies sound like science fiction, but they’re becoming possible thanks to nanoparticles.

“In medicine and other biological settings, nanotechnology is amazing and helpful, but it could be harmful if used improperly,” said Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) chemist Ashley Bradley, part of a team of researchers who conducted a comprehensive survey of nanobiotechnology applications and policies.

Their research, available in Health Security, works to sum up the very large, active field of nanotechnology in biology applications, draw attention to regulatory gaps, and offer areas for further consideration.

…

A July 12, 2023 PNNL news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, delves further into the topic, Note: A link has been removed,

“In our research, we learned there aren’t many global regulations yet,” said Bradley. “And we need to create a common set of rules to figure out the ethical boundaries.”

Nanoparticles, big differences

Nanoparticles are clusters of molecules with different properties than large amounts of the same substances. In medicine and other biology applications, these properties allow nanoparticles to act as the packaging that delivers treatments through cell walls and the difficult to cross blood-brain barrier.

“You can think of the nanoparticles a little bit like the plastic around shredded cheese,” said PNNL chemist Kristin Omberg. “It makes it possible to get something perishable directly where you want it, but afterwards you’ve got to deal with a whole lot of substance where it wasn’t before.”

Unfortunately, dealing with nanoparticles in new places isn’t straightforward. Carbon is pencil lead, nano carbon conducts electricity. The same material may have different properties at the nanoscale, but most countries still regulate it the same as bulk material, if the material is regulated at all.

For example, zinc oxide, a material that was stable and unreactive as a pigment in white paint, is now accumulating in oceans when used as nanoparticles in sunscreen, warranting a call to create alternative reef-safe sunscreens. And although fats and lipids aren’t regulated, the researchers suggest which agencies could weigh in on regulations were fats to become after-treatment byproducts.

The article also inventories national and international agencies, organizations, and governing bodies with an interest in understanding how nanoparticles break down or react in a living organism and the environmental life cycle of a nanoparticle. Because nanobiotechnology spans materials science, biology, medicine, environmental science, and tech, these disparate research and regulatory disciplines must come together, often for the first time—to fully understand the impact on humans and the environment.

Dual use: Good for us, bad for us

Like other quickly growing fields, there’s a time lag between the promise of new advances and the possibilities of unintended uses.

“There were so many more applications than we thought there were,” said Bradley, who collected exciting nanobio examples such as Alzheimer’s treatment, permanent contact lenses, organ replacement, and enhanced muscle recovery, among others.

The article also highlights concerns about crossing the blood-brain barrier, thought-initiated control of computers, and nano-enabled DNA editing where the researchers suggest more caution, questioning, and attention could be warranted. This attention spans everything from deep fundamental research and regulations all the way to what Omberg called “the equivalent of tattoo removal” if home-DNA splicing attempts go south.

The researchers draw parallels to more established fields such as synthetic bio and pharmacology, which offer lessons to be learned from current concerns such as the unintended consequences of fentanyl and opioids. They believe these fields also offer examples of innovative coordination between science and ethics, such as synthetic bio’s IGEM [The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition]—student competition, to think about not just how to create, but also to shape the use and control of new technologies.

Omberg said unusually enthusiastic early reviewers of the article contributed even more potential uses and concerns, demonstrating that experts in many fields recognize ethical nanobiotechnology is an issue to get in front of. “This is a train that’s going. It will be sad if 10 years from now, we haven’t figured how to talk about it.”

Funding for the team’s research was supported by PNNL’s Biorisk Beyond the List National Security Directorate Objective.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

The Promise of Emergent Nanobiotechnologies for In Vivo Applications and Implications for Safety and Security by Anne M. Arnold, Ashley M. Bradley, Karen L. Taylor, Zachary C. Kennedy, and Kristin M. Omberg. Health Security.Oct 2022.408-423.Published in Volume: 20 Issue 5: October 17, 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2022.0014 Published Online:17 Oct 2022

This paper is open access.

You can find out more about IGEM (The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition) here.

Comments (brief)

It seems a little odd that the news release (“Prosthetics moved by thoughts …”) and the paper both reference neurotechnology without ever mentioning it by name. Here’s the reference from the paper, Note: Links have been removed,

Nanoparticles May Be Developed to Facilitate Cognitive Enhancements

The development and implementation of NPs that enhance cognitive function has yet to be realized. However, recent advances on the micro- and macro-level with neural–machine interfacing provide the building blocks necessary to develop this technology on the nanoscale. A noninvasive brain–computer interface to control a robotic arm was developed by teams at 2 universities.157 A US-based company, Neuralink, [emphasis mine] is at the forefront of implementing implantable, intracortical microelectrodes that provide an interface between the human brain and technology.158,159 Utilization of intracortical microelectrodes may ultimately provide thought-initiated access and control of computers and mobile devices, and possibly expand cognitive function by accessing underutilized areas of the brain.158

Neuralink (founded by Elon Musk) is controversial for its animal testing practices. You can find out more in Björn Ólafsson’s May 30, 2023 article for Sentient Media.

The focus on nanoparticles as the key factor in the various technologies and applications mentioned seems narrow but necessary given the breadth of topics covered in the paper as the authors themselves note in the paper’s abstract,

… In this article, while not comprehensive, we attempt to illustrate the breadth and promise of bionanotechnology developments, and how they may present future safety and security challenges. Specifically, we address current advancements to streamline the development of engineered NPs for in vivo applications and provide discussion on nano–bio interactions, NP in vivo delivery, nanoenhancement of human performance, nanomedicine, and the impacts of NPs on human health and the environment.

…

They have a good overview of the history and discussions about nanotechnology risks and regulation. It’s international in scope with a heavy emphasis on US efforts, as one would expect.

For anyone who’s interested in the neurotechnology end of things, I’ve got a July 17, 2023 commentary “Unveiling the Neurotechnology Landscape: Scientific Advancements, Innovations and Major Trends—a UNESCO report.” The report was launched July 13, 2023 during UNESCO’s Global dialogue on the ethics of neurotechnology (see my July 7, 2023 posting about the then upcoming dialogue for links to more UNESCO information). Both the July 17 and July 7, 2023 postings included additional information about Neuralink.

Unveiling the Neurotechnology Landscape: Scientific Advancements, Innovations and Major Trends—a UNESCO report

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Launched on Thursday, July 13, 2023 during UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) “Global dialogue on the ethics of neurotechnology,” is a report tying together the usual measures of national scientific supremacy (number of papers published and number of patents filed) with information on corporate investment in the field. Consequently, “Unveiling the Neurotechnology Landscape: Scientific Advancements, Innovations and Major Trends” by Daniel S. Hain, Roman Jurowetzki, Mariagrazia Squicciarini, and Lihui Xu provides better insight into the international neurotechnology scene than is sometimes found in these kinds of reports. By the way, the report is open access.

Here’s what I mean, from the report‘s short summary,

…

Since 2013, government investments in this field have exceeded $6 billion. Private investment has also seen significant growth, with annual funding experiencing a 22-fold increase from 2010 to 2020, reaching $7.3 billion and totaling $33.2 billion.

This investment has translated into a 35-fold growth in neuroscience publications between 2000-2021 and 20-fold growth in innovations between 2022-2020, as proxied by patents. However, not all are poised to benefit from such developments, as big divides emerge.

Over 80% of high-impact neuroscience publications are produced by only ten countries, while 70% of countries contributed fewer than 10 such papers over the period considered. Similarly, five countries only hold 87% of IP5 neurotech patents.

This report sheds light on the neurotechnology ecosystem, that is, what is being developed, where and by whom, and informs about how neurotechnology interacts with other technological trajectories, especially Artificial Intelligence [emphasis mine]. [p. 2]

…

The money aspect is eye-opening even when you already have your suspicions. Also, it’s not entirely unexpected to learn that only ten countries produce over 80% of the high impact neurotech papers and that only five countries hold 87% of the IP5 neurotech patents but it is stunning to see it in context. (If you’re not familiar with the term ‘IP5 patents’, scroll down in this post to the relevant subhead. Hint: It means the patent was filed in one of the top five jurisdictions; I’ll leave you to guess which ones those might be.)

“Since 2013 …” isn’t quite as informative as the authors may have hoped. I wish they had given a time frame for government investments similar to what they did for corporate investments (e.g., 2010 – 2020). Also, is the $6B (likely in USD) government investment cumulative or an estimated annual number? To sum up, I would have appreciated parallel structure and specificity.

Nitpicks aside, there’s some very good material intended for policy makers. On that note, some of the analysis is beyond me. I haven’t used anything even somewhat close to their analytical tools in years and years. This commentaries reflects my interests and a very rapid reading. One last thing, this is being written from a Canadian perspective. With those caveats in mind, here’s some of what I found.

A definition, social issues, country statistics, and more

There’s a definition for neurotechnology and a second mention of artificial intelligence being used in concert with neurotechnology. From the report‘s executive summary,

Neurotechnology consists of devices and procedures used to access, monitor, investigate, assess, manipulate, and/or emulate the structure and function of the neural systems of animals or human beings. It is poised to revolutionize our understanding of the brain and to unlock innovative solutions to treat a wide range of diseases and disorders.

…

Similarly to Artificial Intelligence (AI), and also due to its convergence with AI, neurotechnology may have profound societal and economic impact, beyond the medical realm. As neurotechnology directly relates to the brain, it triggers ethical considerations about fundamental aspects of human existence, including mental integrity, human dignity, personal identity, freedom of thought, autonomy, and privacy [emphases mine]. Its potential for enhancement purposes and its accessibility further amplifies its prospect social and societal implications.

…

The recent discussions held at UNESCO’s Executive Board further shows Member States’ desire to address the ethics and governance of neurotechnology through the elaboration of a new standard-setting instrument on the ethics of neurotechnology, to be adopted in 2025. To this end, it is important to explore the neurotechnology landscape, delineate its boundaries, key players, and trends, and shed light on neurotech’s scientific and technological developments. [p. 7]

…

Here’s how they sourced the data for the report,

The present report addresses such a need for evidence in support of policy making in
relation to neurotechnology by devising and implementing a novel methodology on data from scientific articles and patents:

● We detect topics over time and extract relevant keywords using a transformer-
based language models fine-tuned for scientific text. Publication data for the period
2000-2021 are sourced from the Scopus database and encompass journal articles
and conference proceedings in English. The 2,000 most cited publications per year
are further used in in-depth content analysis.
● Keywords are identified through Named Entity Recognition and used to generate
search queries for conducting a semantic search on patents’ titles and abstracts,
using another language model developed for patent text. This allows us to identify
patents associated with the identified neuroscience publications and their topics.
The patent data used in the present analysis are sourced from the European
Patent Office’s Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT). We consider
IP5 patents filed between 2000-2020 having an English language abstract and
exclude patents solely related to pharmaceuticals.

This approach allows mapping the advancements detailed in scientific literature to the technological applications contained in patent applications, allowing for an analysis of the linkages between science and technology. This almost fully automated novel approach allows repeating the analysis as neurotechnology evolves. [pp. 8-9[

Findings in bullet points,

Key stylized facts are:
● The field of neuroscience has witnessed a remarkable surge in the overall number
of publications since 2000, exhibiting a nearly 35-fold increase over the period
considered, reaching 1.2 million in 2021. The annual number of publications in
neuroscience has nearly tripled since 2000, exceeding 90,000 publications a year
in 2021. This increase became even more pronounced since 2019.
● The United States leads in terms of neuroscience publication output (40%),
followed by the United Kingdom (9%), Germany (7%), China (5%), Canada (4%),
Japan (4%), Italy (4%), France (4%), the Netherlands (3%), and Australia (3%).
These countries account for over 80% of neuroscience publications from 2000 to
2021.
● Big divides emerge, with 70% of countries in the world having less than 10 high-
impact neuroscience publications between 2000 to 2021.
● Specific neurotechnology-related research trends between 2000 and 2021 include:
○ An increase in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research around 2010,
maintaining a consistent presence ever since.
○ A significant surge in Epilepsy Detection research in 2017 and 2018,
reflecting the increased use of AI and machine learning in healthcare.
○ Consistent interest in Neuroimaging Analysis, which peaks around 2004,
likely because of its importance in brain activity and language
comprehension studies.
○ While peaking in 2016 and 2017, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) remains a
persistent area of research, underlining its potential in treating conditions
like Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor.
● Between 2000 and 2020, the total number of patent applications in this field
increased significantly, experiencing a 20-fold increase from less than 500 to over
12,000. In terms of annual figures, a consistent upward trend in neurotechnology-10
related patent applications emerges, with a notable doubling observed between
2015 and 2020.
• The United States account for nearly half of all worldwide patent applications (47%).
Other major contributors include South Korea (11%), China (10%), Japan (7%),
Germany (7%), and France (5%). These five countries together account for 87%
of IP5 neurotech patents applied between 2000 and 2020.
○ The United States has historically led the field, with a peak around 2010, a
decline towards 2015, and a recovery up to 2020.
○ South Korea emerged as a significant contributor after 1990, overtaking
Germany in the late 2000s to become the second-largest developer of
neurotechnology. By the late 2010s, South Korea’s annual neurotechnology
patent applications approximated those of the United States.
○ China exhibits a sharp increase in neurotechnology patent applications in
the mid-2010s, bringing it on par with the United States in terms of
application numbers.
● The United States ranks highest in both scientific publications and patents,
indicating their strong ability to transform knowledge into marketable inventions.
China, France, and Korea excel in leveraging knowledge to develop patented
innovations. Conversely, countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy,
Canada, Brazil, and Australia lag behind in effectively translating neurotech
knowledge into patentable innovations.
● In terms of patent quality measured by forward citations, the leading countries are
Germany, US, China, Japan, and Korea.
● A breakdown of patents by technology field reveals that Computer Technology is
the most important field in neurotechnology, exceeding Medical Technology,
Biotechnology, and Pharmaceuticals. The growing importance of algorithmic
applications, including neural computing techniques, also emerges by looking at
the increase in patent applications in these fields between 2015-2020. Compared
to the reference year, computer technologies-related patents in neurotech
increased by 355% and by 92% in medical technology.
● An analysis of the specialization patterns of the top-5 countries developing
neurotechnologies reveals that Germany has been specializing in chemistry-
related technology fields, whereas Asian countries, particularly South Korea and
China, focus on computer science and electrical engineering-related fields. The
United States exhibits a balanced configuration with specializations in both
chemistry and computer science-related fields.
● The entities – i.e. both companies and other institutions – leading worldwide
innovation in the neurotech space are: IBM (126 IP5 patents, US), Ping An
Technology (105 IP5 patents, CH), Fujitsu (78 IP5 patents, JP), Microsoft (76 IP511
patents, US)1, Samsung (72 IP5 patents, KR), Sony (69 IP5 patents JP) and Intel
(64 IP5 patents US)

This report further proposes a pioneering taxonomy of neurotechnologies based on International Patent Classification (IPC) codes.

• 67 distinct patent clusters in neurotechnology are identified, which mirror the diverse research and development landscape of the field. The 20 most prominent neurotechnology groups, particularly in areas like multimodal neuromodulation, seizure prediction, neuromorphic computing [emphasis mine], and brain-computer interfaces, point to potential strategic areas for research and commercialization.
• The variety of patent clusters identified mirrors the breadth of neurotechnology’s potential applications, from medical imaging and limb rehabilitation to sleep optimization and assistive exoskeletons.
• The development of a baseline IPC-based taxonomy for neurotechnology offers a structured framework that enriches our understanding of this technological space, and can facilitate research, development and analysis. The identified key groups mirror the interdisciplinary nature of neurotechnology and underscores the potential impact of neurotechnology, not only in healthcare but also in areas like information technology and biomaterials, with non-negligible effects over societies and economies.

1 If we consider Microsoft Technology Licensing LLM and Microsoft Corporation as being under the same umbrella, Microsoft leads worldwide developments with 127 IP5 patents. Similarly, if we were to consider that Siemens AG and Siemens Healthcare GmbH belong to the same conglomerate, Siemens would appear much higher in the ranking, in third position, with 84 IP5 patents. The distribution of intellectual property assets across companies belonging to the same conglomerate is frequent and mirrors strategic as well as operational needs and features, among others. [pp. 9-11]

Surprises and comments

Interesting and helpful to learn that “neurotechnology interacts with other technological trajectories, especially Artificial Intelligence;” this has changed and improved my understanding of neurotechnology.

It was unexpected to find Canada in the top ten countries producing neuroscience papers. However, finding out that the country lags in translating its ‘neuro’ knowledge into patentable innovation is not entirely a surprise.

It can’t be an accident that countries with major ‘electronics and computing’ companies lead in patents. These companies do have researchers but they also buy startups to acquire patents. They (and ‘patent trolls’) will also file patents preemptively. For the patent trolls, it’s a moneymaking proposition and for the large companies, it’s a way of protecting their own interests and/or (I imagine) forcing a sale.

The mention of neuromorphic (brainlike) computing in the taxonomy section was surprising and puzzling. Up to this point, I’ve thought of neuromorphic computing as a kind of alternative or addition to standard computing but the authors have blurred the lines as per UNESCO’s definition of neurotechnology (specifically, “… emulate the structure and function of the neural systems of animals or human beings”) . Again, this report is broadening my understanding of neurotechnology. Of course, it required two instances before I quite grasped it, the definition and the taxonomy.

What’s puzzling is that neuromorphic engineering, a broader term that includes neuromorphic computing, isn’t used or mentioned. (For an explanation of the terms neuromorphic computing and neuromorphic engineering, there’s my June 23, 2023 posting, “Neuromorphic engineering: an overview.” )

The report

I won’t have time for everything. Here are some of the highlights from my admittedly personal perspective.

It’s not only about curing disease

From the report,

Neurotechnology’s applications however extend well beyond medicine [emphasis mine], and span from research, to education, to the workplace, and even people’s everyday life. Neurotechnology-based solutions may enhance learning and skill acquisition and boost focus through brain stimulation techniques. For instance, early research finds that brain- zapping caps appear to boost memory for at least one month (Berkeley, 2022). This could one day be used at home to enhance memory functions [emphasis mine]. They can further enable new ways to interact with the many digital devices we use in everyday life, transforming the way we work, live and interact. One example is the Sound Awareness wristband developed by a Stanford team (Neosensory, 2022) which enables individuals to “hear” by converting sound into tactile feedback, so that sound impaired individuals can perceive spoken words through their skin. Takagi and Nishimoto (2023) analyzed the brain scans taken through Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as individuals were shown thousands of images. They then trained a generative AI tool called Stable Diffusion2 on the brain scan data of the study’s participants, thus creating images that roughly corresponded to the real images shown. While this does not correspond to reading the mind of people, at least not yet, and some limitations of the study have been highlighted (Parshall, 2023), it nevertheless represents an important step towards developing the capability to interface human thoughts with computers [emphasis mine], via brain data interpretation.

While the above examples may sound somewhat like science fiction, the recent uptake of generative Artificial Intelligence applications and of large language models such as ChatGPT or Bard, demonstrates that the seemingly impossible can quickly become an everyday reality. At present, anyone can purchase online electroencephalogram (EEG) devices for a few hundred dollars [emphasis mine], to measure the electrical activity of their brain for meditation, gaming, or other purposes. [pp. 14-15]

This is very impressive achievement. Some of the research cited was published earlier this year (2023). The extraordinary speed is a testament to the efforts by the authors and their teams. It’s also a testament to how quickly the field is moving.

I’m glad to see the mention of and focus on consumer neurotechnology. (While the authors don’t speculate, I am free to do so.) Consumer neurotechnology could be viewed as one of the steps toward normalizing a cyborg future for all of us. Yes, we have books, television programmes, movies, and video games, which all normalize the idea but the people depicted have been severely injured and require the augmentation. With consumer neurotechnology, you have easily accessible devices being used to enhance people who aren’t injured, they just want to be ‘better’.

This phrase seemed particularly striking “… an important step towards developing the capability to interface human thoughts with computers” in light of some claims made by the Australian military in my June 13, 2023 posting “Mind-controlled robots based on graphene: an Australian research story.” (My posting has an embedded video demonstrating the Brain Robotic Interface (BRI) in action. Also, see the paragraph below the video for my ‘measured’ response.)

There’s no mention of the military in the report which seems more like a deliberate rather than inadvertent omission given the importance of military innovation where technology is concerned.

This section gives a good overview of government initiatives (in the report it’s followed by a table of the programmes),

Thanks to the promises it holds, neurotechnology has garnered significant attention from both governments and the private sector and is considered by many as an investment priority. According to the International Brain Initiative (IBI), brain research funding has become increasingly important over the past ten years, leading to a rise in large-scale state-led programs aimed at advancing brain intervention technologies(International Brain Initiative, 2021). Since 2013, initiatives such as the United States’ Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and the European Union’s Human Brain Project (HBP), as well as major national initiatives in China, Japan and South Korea have been launched with significant funding support from the respective governments. The Canadian Brain Research Strategy, initially operated as a multi- stakeholder coalition on brain research, is also actively seeking funding support from the government to transform itself into a national research initiative (Canadian Brain Research Strategy, 2022). A similar proposal is also seen in the case of the Australian Brain Alliance, calling for the establishment of an Australian Brain Initiative (Australian Academy of Science, n.d.). [pp. 15-16]

Privacy

There are some concerns such as these,

Beyond the medical realm, research suggests that emotional responses of consumers
related to preferences and risks can be concurrently tracked by neurotechnology, such
as neuroimaging and that neural data can better predict market-level outcomes than
traditional behavioral data (Karmarkar and Yoon, 2016). As such, neural data is
increasingly sought after in the consumer market for purposes such as digital
phenotyping4, neurogaming 5，and neuromarketing6 (UNESCO, 2021). This surge in demand gives rise to risks like hacking, unauthorized data reuse, extraction of privacy-sensitive information, digital surveillance, criminal exploitation of data, and other forms of abuse. These risks prompt the question of whether neural data needs distinct definition and safeguarding measures.

These issues are particularly relevant today as a wide range of electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets that can be used at home are now available in consumer markets for purposes that range from meditation assistance to controlling electronic devices through the mind. Imagine an individual is using one of these devices to play a neurofeedback game, which records the person’s brain waves during the game. Without the person being aware, the system can also identify the patterns associated with an undiagnosed mental health condition, such as anxiety. If the game company sells this data to third parties, e.g. health insurance providers, this may lead to an increase of insurance fees based on undisclosed information. This hypothetical situation would represent a clear violation of mental privacy and of unethical use of neural data.

Another example is in the field of advertising, where companies are increasingly interested in using neuroimaging to better understand consumers’ responses to their products or advertisements, a practice known as neuromarketing. For instance, a company might use neural data to determine which advertisements elicit the most positive emotional responses in consumers. While this can help companies improve their marketing strategies, it raises significant concerns about mental privacy. Questions arise in relation to consumers being aware or not that their neural data is being used, and in the extent to which this can lead to manipulative advertising practices that unfairly exploit unconscious preferences. Such potential abuses underscore the need for explicit consent and rigorous data protection measures in the use of neurotechnology for neuromarketing purposes. [pp. 21-22]

Legalities

Some countries already have laws and regulations regarding neurotechnology data,

At the national level, only a few countries have enacted laws and regulations to protect mental integrity or have included neuro-data in personal data protection laws (UNESCO, University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) and State University of New York – Downstate Health Sciences University, 2023). Examples are the constitutional reform undertaken by Chile (Republic of Chile, 2021), the Charter for the responsible development of neurotechnologies of the Government of France (Government of France, 2022), and the Digital Rights Charter of the Government of Spain (Government of Spain, 2021). They propose different approaches to the regulation and protection of human rights in relation to neurotechnology. Countries such as the UK are also examining under which circumstances neural data may be considered as a special category of data under the general data protection framework (i.e. UK’s GDPR) (UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, 2023) [p. 24]

As you can see, these are recent laws. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt here in Canada even though there is an act being reviewed in Parliament that could conceivably include neural data. This is from my May 1, 2023 posting,

Bill C-27 (Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022) is what I believe is called an omnibus bill as it includes three different pieces of proposed legislation (the Consumer Privacy Protection Act [CPPA], the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act [AIDA], and the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act [PIDPTA]). [emphasis added July 11, 2023] You can read the Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada summary here or a detailed series of descriptions of the act here on the ISED’s Canada’s Digital Charter webpage.

My focus at the time was artificial intelligence and, now, after reading this UNESCO report and briefly looking at the Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada summary and a detailed series of descriptions of the act on ISED’s Canada’s Digital Charter webpage, I don’t see anything that specifies neural data but it’s not excluded either.

IP5 patents

Here’s the explanation (the footnote is included at the end of the excerpt),

IP5 patents represent a subset of overall patents filed worldwide, which have the
characteristic of having been filed in at least one top intellectual property offices (IPO)
worldwide (the so called IP5, namely the Chinese National Intellectual Property
Administration, CNIPA (formerly SIPO); the European Patent Office, EPO; the Japan
Patent Office, JPO; the Korean Intellectual Property Office, KIPO; and the United States
Patent and Trademark Office, USPTO) as well as another country, which may or may not be an IP5. This signals their potential applicability worldwide, as their inventiveness and industrial viability have been validated by at least two leading IPOs. This gives these patents a sort of “quality” check, also since patenting inventions is costly and if applicants try to protect the same invention in several parts of the world, this normally mirrors that the applicant has expectations about their importance and expected value. If we were to conduct the same analysis using information about individually considered patent applied worldwide, i.e. without filtering for quality nor considering patent families, we would risk conducting a biased analysis based on duplicated data. Also, as patentability standards vary across countries and IPOs, and what matters for patentability is the existence (or not) of prior art in the IPO considered, we would risk mixing real innovations with patents related to catching up phenomena in countries that are not at the forefront of the technology considered.

9 The five IP offices (IP5) is a forum of the five largest intellectual property offices in the world that was set up to improve the efficiency of the examination process for patents worldwide. The IP5 Offices together handle about 80% of the world’s patent applications, and 95% of all work carried out under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), see http://www.fiveipoffices.org. (Dernis et al., 2015) [p. 31]

AI assistance on this report

As noted earlier I have next to no experience with the analytical tools having not attempted this kind of work in several years. Here’s an example of what they were doing,

We utilize a combination of text embeddings based on Bidirectional Encoder
Representations from Transformer (BERT), dimensionality reduction, and hierarchical
clustering inspired by the BERTopic methodology 12 to identify latent themes within
research literature. Latent themes or topics in the context of topic modeling represent
clusters of words that frequently appear together within a collection of documents (Blei, 2012). These groupings are not explicitly labeled but are inferred through computational analysis examining patterns in word usage. These themes are ‘hidden’ within the text, only to be revealed through this analysis. …

…

We further utilize OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to enrich our understanding of topics’ keywords and to generate topic labels (OpenAI, 2023), thus supplementing expert review of the broad interdisciplinary corpus. Recently, GPT-4 has shown impressive results in medical contexts across various evaluations (Nori et al., 2023), making it a useful tool to enhance the information obtained from prior analysis stages, and to complement them. The automated process enhances the evaluation workflow, effectively emphasizing neuroscience themes pertinent to potential neurotechnology patents. Notwithstanding existing concerns about hallucinations (Lee, Bubeck and Petro, 2023) and errors in generative AI models, this methodology employs the GPT-4 model for summarization and interpretation tasks, which significantly mitigates the likelihood of hallucinations. Since the model is constrained to the context provided by the keyword collections, it limits the potential for fabricating information outside of the specified boundaries, thereby enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the output. [pp. 33-34]

I couldn’t resist adding the ChatGPT paragraph given all of the recent hoopla about it.

Multimodal neuromodulation and neuromorphic computing patents

I think this gives a pretty good indication of the activity on the patent front,

The largest, coherent topic, termed “multimodal neuromodulation,” comprises 535
patents detailing methodologies for deep or superficial brain stimulation designed to
address neurological and psychiatric ailments. These patented technologies interact with various points in neural circuits to induce either Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) or Long-Term Depression (LTD), offering treatment for conditions such as obsession, compulsion, anxiety, depression, Parkinson’s disease, and other movement disorders. The modalities encompass implanted deep-brain stimulators (DBS), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). Among the most representative documents for this cluster are patents with titles: Electrical stimulation of structures within the brain or Systems and methods for enhancing or optimizing neural stimulation therapy for treating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and or other movement disorders. [p.65]

Given my longstanding interest in memristors, which (I believe) have to a large extent helped to stimulate research into neuromorphic computing, this had to be included. Then, there was the brain-computer interfaces cluster,

A cluster identified as “Neuromorphic Computing” consists of 366 patents primarily
focused on devices designed to mimic human neural networks for efficient and adaptable computation. The principal elements of these inventions are resistive memory cells and artificial synapses. They exhibit properties similar to the neurons and synapses in biological brains, thus granting these devices the ability to learn and modulate responses based on rewards, akin to the adaptive cognitive capabilities of the human brain.

The primary technology classes associated with these patents fall under specific IPC
codes, representing the fields of neural network models, analog computers, and static
storage structures. Essentially, these classifications correspond to technologies that are key to the construction of computers and exhibit cognitive functions similar to human brain processes.

Examples for this cluster include neuromorphic processing devices that leverage
variations in resistance to store and process information, artificial synapses exhibiting
spike-timing dependent plasticity, and systems that allow event-driven learning and
reward modulation within neuromorphic computers.

In relation to neurotechnology as a whole, the “neuromorphic computing” cluster holds significant importance. It embodies the fusion of neuroscience and technology, thereby laying the basis for the development of adaptive and cognitive computational systems. Understanding this specific cluster provides a valuable insight into the progressing domain of neurotechnology, promising potential advancements across diverse fields, including artificial intelligence and healthcare.

The “Brain-Computer Interfaces” cluster, consisting of 146 patents, embodies a key aspect of neurotechnology that focuses on improving the interface between the brain and external devices. The technology classification codes associated with these patents primarily refer to methods or devices for treatment or protection of eyes and ears, devices for introducing media into, or onto, the body, and electric communication techniques, which are foundational elements of brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies.

Key patents within this cluster include a brain-computer interface apparatus adaptable to use environment and method of operating thereof, a double closed circuit brain-machine interface system, and an apparatus and method of brain-computer interface for device controlling based on brain signal. These inventions mainly revolve around the concept of using brain signals to control external devices, such as robotic arms, and improving the classification performance of these interfaces, even after long periods of non-use.

The inventions described in these patents improve the accuracy of device control, maintain performance over time, and accommodate multiple commands, thus significantly enhancing the functionality of BCIs.

Other identified technologies include systems for medical image analysis, limb rehabilitation, tinnitus treatment, sleep optimization, assistive exoskeletons, and advanced imaging techniques, among others. [pp. 66-67]

Having sections on neuromorphic computing and brain-computer interface patents in immediate proximity led to more speculation on my part. Imagine how much easier it would be to initiate a BCI connection if it’s powered with a neuromorphic (brainlike) computer/device. [ETA July 21, 2023: Following on from that thought, it might be more than just easier to initiate a BCI connection. Could a brainlike computer become part of your brain? Why not? it’s been successfully argued that a robotic wheelchair was part of someone’s body, see my January 30, 2013 posting and scroll down about 40% of the way.)]

Neurotech policy debates

The report concludes with this,

Neurotechnology is a complex and rapidly evolving technological paradigm whose
trajectories have the power to shape people’s identity, autonomy, privacy, sentiments,
behaviors and overall well-being, i.e. the very essence of what it means to be human.

Designing and implementing careful and effective norms and regulations ensuring that neurotechnology is developed and deployed in an ethical manner, for the good of
individuals and for society as a whole, call for a careful identification and characterization of the issues at stake. This entails shedding light on the whole neurotechnology ecosystem, that is what is being developed, where and by whom, and also understanding how neurotechnology interacts with other developments and technological trajectories, especially AI. Failing to do so may result in ineffective (at best) or distorted policies and policy decisions, which may harm human rights and human dignity.

…

Addressing the need for evidence in support of policy making, the present report offers first time robust data and analysis shedding light on the neurotechnology landscape worldwide. To this end, its proposes and implements an innovative approach that leverages artificial intelligence and deep learning on data from scientific publications and paten[t]s to identify scientific and technological developments in the neurotech space. The methodology proposed represents a scientific advance in itself, as it constitutes a quasi- automated replicable strategy for the detection and documentation of neurotechnology- related breakthroughs in science and innovation, to be repeated over time to account for the evolution of the sector. Leveraging this approach, the report further proposes an IPC-based taxonomy for neurotechnology which allows for a structured framework to the exploration of neurotechnology, to enable future research, development and analysis. The innovative methodology proposed is very flexible and can in fact be leveraged to investigate different emerging technologies, as they arise.

…

In terms of technological trajectories, we uncover a shift in the neurotechnology industry, with greater emphasis being put on computer and medical technologies in recent years, compared to traditionally dominant trajectories related to biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. This shift warrants close attention from policymakers, and calls for attention in relation to the latest (converging) developments in the field, especially AI and related methods and applications and neurotechnology.

This is all the more important and the observed growth and specialization patterns are unfolding in the context of regulatory environments that, generally, are either not existent or not fit for purpose. Given the sheer implications and impact of neurotechnology on the very essence of human beings, this lack of regulation poses key challenges related to the possible infringement of mental integrity, human dignity, personal identity, privacy, freedom of thought, and autonomy, among others. Furthermore, issues surrounding accessibility and the potential for neurotech enhancement applications triggers significant concerns, with far-reaching implications for individuals and societies. [pp. 72-73]

Last words about the report

Informative, readable, and thought-provoking. And, it helped broaden my understanding of neurotechnology.

Future endeavours?

I’m hopeful that one of these days one of these groups (UNESCO, Canadian Science Policy Centre, or ???) will tackle the issue of business bankruptcy in the neurotechnology sector. It has already occurred as noted in my ““Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy [long read]” April 5, 2022 posting. That story opens with a woman going blind in a New York subway when her neural implant fails. It’s how she found out the company, which supplied her implant was going out of business.

In my July 7, 2023 posting about the UNESCO July 2023 dialogue on neurotechnology, I’ve included information on Neuralink (one of Elon Musk’s companies) and its approval (despite some investigations) by the US Food and Drug Administration to start human clinical trials. Scroll down about 75% of the way to the “Food for thought” subhead where you will find stories about allegations made against Neuralink.

The end

If you want to know more about the field, the report offers a seven-page bibliography and there’s a lot of material here where you can start with this December 3, 2019 posting “Neural and technological inequalities” which features an article mentioning a discussion between two scientists. Surprisingly (to me), the source article is in Fast Company (a leading progressive business media brand), according to their tagline)..

I have two categories you may want to check: Human Enhancement and Neuromorphic Engineering. There are also a number of tags: neuromorphic computing, machine/flesh, brainlike computing, cyborgs, neural implants, neuroprosthetics, memristors, and more.

Should you have any observations or corrections, please feel free to leave them in the Comments section of this posting.