Now it is no secret that technology is getting smarter, faster, especially with the controversy over the safety of AI.

Artificial intelligence.

Our next guest is particularly concerned about how tax rapid expansion could ramp up the assault on our privacy and affectively read our minds in her new book the battle for your brain, the author warns of the threats of emerging narrow technology on your freedom of thought.

She joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how governments can protect cognitive liberty.

Walter: thank you, welcome to the show.

>> Thanks for having me.

Walter: you have this great book, the battle for your brain.

What is the battle for our brain?

>> I think the battle is underway to gain access to our brain activity and to get to a world of greater brain transparency.

That is being able to peer into our brains, collect the data that is they, can modify the data that's their and really change our brains and mental experiences.

Walter: who is doing this?

>> Fair enough, the battle I am referring to is the broader battle by corporations and governments getting access to the brain.

Everything from the coming age of brain wearables and neurotechnology, we can talk about what that means, to government attempts to access the brain whether that is through interrogating criminal suspects are the development of brain biometric programs.

Or even purported brain control weaponry that's maybe underway in other countries.

Walter: let's start with that technology, you talk about neurotechnology.

That means that somebody, perhaps with our permission because we buy a device, will sort of read our brain waves.

Is that right?

>> That's approximately right.

People are already accustomed to having sensors that pick up their heart rates or their breath or sleep patterns.

The idea is that brain sensors have already been put into devices, right now they are largely niche applications with headbands one across the forehead.

But companies from Metta, snap, Microsoft and even Apple are starting to embed brain sensors that can pick up the electrical activity in our brain into everyday devices.

Like earbuds or headphones or the soft cups around them with brain sensors.

Watches that can pick up rain activity as it goes from your brain down your arm to your wrist.

The hope of these technologies is to really open the brain up for ways for people to be able to track their own brain activity, reduce their stress levels, improve their focus, navigate through augmented and virtual reality or even become the way in which we interface with the rest of our technology.

Walter: tell me what information could it read?

>> Right now, the advances that have been made have been pretty startling.

Largely because of improvements in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition.

Plus the miniaturization of sensors that can start to pick up electrical activity.

These are not mind reading devices, they are not literally decoding the thoughts in a person's mind.

What they can do is pick up different brain stages that reflect emotion.

Are you happy, or sad?

Are you bored, is your mind wandering, are you paying attention?

Are you focused or tired?

With additional probes in the environment, for example if you are playing a game and something is embedded into the game platform like a subliminal message, researchers have shown it is possible to even probe the brain for information it like a pin number.

Or in address.

Or your political preferences or beliefs or desires.

Walter: if I'm wearing one of these things it's because I chose to, I want to have a better interaction with machines around me, or maybe with a game I play or maybe it's oculus or some virtual reality thing.

You talk about cognitive liberty, is that not part of my liberty to say I want these things?

>> Absolutely I talk about cognitive liberty is the right to self-determination that includes both a right to access technology and learn what's happening there or enhance your brain or change it.

But also a rate from interference.

You say you intentionally would make the choice if you wanted to to use the devices.

That won't be true for everyone.

Already in workplaces worldwide, employees have been required to wear brain sensors to track their fatigue levels, to attract their attention or their focus or even their emotional levels in the workplace.

In China, there are reports that people have even been sent home from work based on their brain activity.

Similarly, students in classrooms in China and other countries have had their brain activity monitored by mandate to have to wear these brain wearables.

It is happening in criminal justice systems worldwide where police are interrogating people's brains to see if there is recognition of crime scene details.

Cognitive liberty is about both your right to make a choice to navigate through a game, swipe with your mind or type on a virtual keyboard, but also to not have both the devices mandated nor interference collection of your brain data or manipulation of your brains which can happen to.

These are not just re-devices many are right devices to the human brain.

Walter: you talk about it happening in China where it's mandated that people have these wearables.

Is that done at all in the United States?

Or in the West?

>> I am not familiar in the U.S. of any mandated case of it specifically, except for one.

Which is there is a company called smart cap who has been selling their lifespan device embedded with electrodes and sensors that pick up brain activity.

They have use this product with enterprises, companies worldwide, who use it to track fatigue levels of employees.

It is not that different from driver assist technology which is in some trucks and cars, the differences it is being trained on the brain to pick up that electrical activity that signals a person's fatigue level.

They have reported that they partnered for a trial with North American trucking company to check out smart cap and I suspect there will be increasingly more examples of employers starting to integrate that.

Employers during the Covid pandemic especially during work from home, started to introduce a significantly more number of productivity tracking software programs on employees work from home devices.

I don't think it's a far stretch to imagine in a world where surveillance in the workplace has increased significantly that certain sensors might be integrated at least in limited context even here in the United States.

Walter: let me ask you about the smart caps that could be put on truckers to see if they are getting too fatigued.

Once again that sounds like a good idea to me.

Am I wrong?

>> I actually think that done well, at least for things like long-haul truck drivers or pilots or miners, that the balance of the interest of the individual in that case for their mental privacy relative to the societal risk of someone barreling down the highway while they are asleep, may favor tracking the individual for sleep.

Right to cognitive liberty looks at the balance between societal and individual interest and one thing that smart cap is doing really well as they are minimizing the data that they are collecting.

You could collect a lot more information from the brain and mine it if you are an employer.

Smart cap overrides all of that data on the device, they provide only an algorithmic interpretation on a score of one to five as to whether or not the person is wide-awake or falling asleep in those kinds of practices start to get to the responsible use of this technology.

If you're going to have it in a setting where for example a truck driver has their brain activity monitored for fatigue levels, implementing those kinds of safeguards decreases the intrusion into their mental privacy.

Walter: the fundamental notion in your book seems to be freedom of thought.

That's what the cognitive liberty I think is aiming at.

Why is it so important that we guard freedom of thought?

>> I think freedom of thought is really as you say foundational to this concept of cognitive liberty.

I interpret it more narrowly than the concept of mental privacy which is why I include mental privacy as part of it.

There is a lot that happens in our brains from automatic responses to emotions to basic brain states that mental privacy would cover.

Freedom of thought gets at that inner monologue.

Our thoughts, that space for private reprieve.

Which I think is so fundamental to human flourishing.

It's what gives us that space to decide who we are.

Develop our own self-identity.

Choose what we will share and won't share with other people.

Define our own terms of vulnerability.

Have a place where you think daring thoughts or thoughts that might go against the grain if you are in a tyrannical or authoritarian regime.

Dreaming a dream of resistance and rising up against injustice.

All of that requires that we have a space in which our thoughts are not accessed, our thoughts are not manipulated and we are not being punished for what we are thinking.

I worry when we breached that final domain of privacy, that space for private retrieve, retreat it will be difficult for people to continue to cultivate that inner monologue.

I worry there will be a chilling of even our inner thoughts in ways that could be devastating to humanity.

Walter: it really is the stuff of science-fiction or that we have been warned of by the great science-fiction writers.

Obviously Orwell above all.

So much of this is what happens when machines can read our brains.

>> I think that's right and it's an anxiety you see repeated not just with narrow technologies but increasingly with generative AI.

People worry a lot about our ability for example, to resist manipulation.

Take for example the cognitive biases of the shortcuts that our brains use to be able to have selective attention to different things in our environments.

To be able to tell like of all the things and threats coming at me that one is the tiger to which I need to pay attention to.

When technologies are designed to take advantage of those brain shortcuts and Paris sticks, it could be difficult for us to resist.

Difficult for us to not return to our phones over again, to platforms.

I will watch one more episode you say to yourself.

Cognitive liberty is about that too.

Which is to try to define the line between persuasion and manipulation.

To try to enable us to think freely in a world in which technologies are designed to compete for if not dominate and take over our attention.

Walter: you call it narrow marketing in your book which is this notion that companies could manipulate your thinking.

I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith who writes about how advertising is doing that subliminally.

Why is this much worse and wire the technologies going to do this?

>> Neuro Marketing is one on a spectrum I discuss in a chapter in my book.

It is designed to try to figure out what people's actual responses are, their actual preferences are or their biases well beyond what their self-reports are.

But this idea of trying to figure out what people actually want or desire, bypassing with their conscious preferences and desires are, is not inherently different than what other forms of marketing has done except for its precision and its possibility for misuse.

For example one of the techniques I talk about is a technique called dream incubation.

This is another form of neuro marketing.

It tries to find the moment in which people are in the most suggestible state to market to them.

When blood flow has not fully restored to all parts of their brain after being asleep.

Then to use that moment to try to create positive associations with brands.

This idea of trying to get to the brain when the conscious awareness is not there, again when used to sell us products we may want or are consistent with our preferences or desires, it is not that different than what marketers have done in the past.

What is different is when it's used for purposes that may harm us or it is used to try to intentionally overcome our ability to act otherwise.

Then we need to draw a line and say this falls under the line of manipulation and there will be a lot of technologies in this world of generative AI that we will need to look and see whether they are being designed to do that.

To bypass our conscious decision-making.

Walter: let's talk about some of the upsides of this technology.

How might it help us with mental health?

>> I think that's one of the biggest reasons and drivers, the reason why people will embrace this technology is because it does have extraordinary potential for our mental health and well-being.

I think it is pretty stunning that people are able to tell you everything down to their cholesterol levels or the number of steps they've taken each day but they know virtually nothing about what's happening in their own brains.

That's true whether it's a person who suffers from epilepsy where they can't know in advance that they're going to have an epileptic seizure, to a person studying depression or someone like me with, -- chronic migraines.

I have some indication it's coming on but not many until I have a full-blown headache.

Walter: let me ask you on that, suppose you are fighting migraines, would you voluntarily start using a wearable device?

>> I have.

Very much so.

I have used neural feedback devices to decrease my stress levels which is one of the triggers I have.

I have used wearables that are narrow stimulation devices that instead of needing to take medications I can use that instead to modulate and decrease my pain or interrupt my migraines.

And for people with epileptic seizures for example, the ability to over time they can get a real time of potentially a life-saving alert sent to a mobile device or someone suffering from depression is able to interrupt the patterns of electrical activity that make them the most symptomatic, or even just the majority of us who have a difficult time paying attention during the day.

Or are increasingly distracted as we just talked about by all of the different stimuli in our environments, to use these devices to be able to train or reclaim our focus and bring down our stress levels in our cognitive load.

I think the promise is really extraordinary.

It's the reason I think most people will be excited about it and the reason I think it's so urgent that we change the terms of service for this brand-new category of technology in favor of individual rights.

In favor of being able to keep the data private and use it for our own personal well-being rather than introducing a new form of surveillance, neural surveillance of their masses.

Walter: you were on President Obama's commission and study for bioethical issues.

President Biden does not have one of those.

What would you do if there were one right now?

Do you think government can play in this field or is it something beyond the scope of our current politics?

>> I think they can.

I think it's really unfortunate that since our bioethics commission there has not been another presidential bioethics commission.

There was one going back all the way to President Carter under different titles and names.

Had the effect of being able to, these major technological and scientific advances, ring it to the forefront in public discussion and to convene experts.

Come up with specific recommendations.

Everything from the basics of what funding we need for different programs, and making recommendations to funding agencies, to what kind of expertise and oversight and adaptive regulation would help us get out ahead of these different products and technologies.

I think we need something like that.

We need something at the presidential level, at the executive level that helps to both identify and flush out those recommendations and builds a broader societal conversation and consensus around the pathway forward.

Whether it is metaverse or AI or neurotechnology, all of these in combination are changing fundamentally our brains and mental experiences.

It is really important we come up with a federal approach to how we are going to govern and think about and enable people to have cognitive liberty in this digital age.

Walter: thank you so much for joining us.

>> thank you so much for your time I enjoyed the conversation.