How should we think about Cognitive Technologies and Brain-Computer Interfaces?

An interview with author Olaf Groth, co-author of The Great Remobilization

While Generative AI has taken the lion’s share of recent attention, another set of emerging technologies may soon take us by surprise: Cognitive Technologies. This set of innovations, which includes Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), Wearable Technologies, and AI-enabled synthetic biology, now has the power to understand us better than ever before. How should we think about these new technologies?

This a big question. Thankfully, this is an area that Olaf Groth, PhD has given a lot of thought to. Dr. Groth is the founder and CEO of advisory thinktank Cambrian Futures, and of concept development firm Cambrian Designs. He is the co-author of Solomon’s Code: Humanity in a World of Thinking Machines (Pegasus, 2018), and most recently of The Great Remobilization: Strategies & Designs For A Smarter Future (MIT Press, forthcoming Oct. 17th, 2023).

In this interview, we explore the big questions that this new wave of cognitive technologies presents: What they are, how they impact us, and how we should think about them.

Your book is neatly organized around the 5 Cs that are shaping this great remobilization: China, COVID and pandemic response, climate change, cybersecurity, and lastly, cognitive technologies. What are cognitive technologies, and what role do they play in this?

The cognitive economy has gone through a step change in the development of tools and technologies. These cognitive technologies are now going into the head, and into the body. This means that, instead of just understanding and looking at the body to treat ailments, we're going in and bringing stuff out. That is, it enables an “inside out” approach. Ultimately, these cognitive technologies pave the way for understanding the raw data to make sense of the human better than we could before.

This also has ushered in an era of Behavioral Surveillance. And it's not just behavior. It's also your genetic expression, and the way your body functions, overall. Understanding these insights now changes the relationships that we have with the environment around us. It changes the power that others have over us as they begin to know us better.

In your view, what kinds of regulatory frameworks are needed to keep these new cognitive technologies in check?

We always, unfortunately, assume that we could just apply the current regulations that have been created for the analog environment. That’s not right though, because what happens when you turbocharge those tools? And when you exponentially increase, not just your knowledge about us, but also the reach, the impact of these technologies is huge.

In a split second, new phenomena emerge. We can go back to the obvious, which is the fact that we’re tribal creatures, fundamentally. It's not like we're doing anything different - we are still trying to influence humans. The difference now is that we can now do this at a speed, at a scale, and with a precision that we have never had before. That gives rise to these new emergent phenomena in society and in business relationships.

Most readers will be familiar with simple sorts of wearable technologies, such as their Apple Watch, and the simple physiological measures that are trackable via heart rate or the number of REM cycles you get in a given night. What would you say is categorically different about this newer wave of technology?

Let's start with the wearables. Yes, it can measure your heart rate, and it can help you keep track of your physical performance. But now, it can infer things from those measurements, thanks to data science and AI, that they could never before. For instance, my heart rate, and my heart rhythm, can let you draw conclusions about the hormone movements in my body. This approach can also infer ovulation cycles. There are hundreds of millions of women impacted by this, and you want to be very careful who you give that kind of power to.

On the one hand, understanding these things could be conducive to facilitating career productivity. But at the same time, it's also clear that you now develop a lot more intimacy with your interlocutor, whether that's an employee or somebody else, if you have this kind of information.

This is why we now need new consent mechanisms. And on this particular front, as an example, we don't have regulation that protects individuals from this. We have HIPAA as a law that protects medical information. But much of this data that can be gleaned from wearable tech is not strictly classified as medical information, even though it is very relevant to your health. It's intimate, and it's private.

As a category of cognitive technology, how do you see the new waves of synthetic biology and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) impacting all of this?

There has been incredible recent progress into synthetic biology - not just with the help of CRISPR and genomics, but in understanding how you are wired, literally. It’s also about how you’re encoded, and about being able to change that code fairly effectively.

Another component of this is making sense of how your body overall works with “smart limbs”, for instance, that are sensor-enabled, and AI-enabled. You've likely heard the stories of synthetic retinas and AI-enabled prosthetics - we're still not at market mass market scalability level, but it'll happen as costs come down.

But the most striking example here is brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Invasive and non-invasive brain-computer interfaces that allow you to essentially map the brain, or to directly interact with existing neural architecture.

The brain consists of roughly 100 billion neurons, but we’re only able to model a few 1000 at at a time, in terms of their structure and firing patterns. And so up until now, we’ve not been able to make sense of what's going on, even in the small regions of the brain we’ve tried to model. Brain-computer interfaces promise that, in tandem with quantum computing, we'll soon be able to model millions, or maybe even billions of neurons.

The insights we stand to gain from this are immense.

How should we plan to balance the power of these insights, with the ethical concerns these technologies raise?

On the one hand, these innovators - people like Elon Musk and Brian Johnson will say that these insights will ultimately be able to cure certain forms of disease such as Alzheimer's, paraplegia, or even blindness. And in the general population, it may be able to enhance our learning capability, and help us access more of our memories. That's all fantastic.

But the question is - do we want to leave it to those individual innovators? Clearly, we need regulatory oversight. Currently, we do have a degree of oversight in the FDA, as right now these are all classified as medical trials. But as we go, we have to be very careful that we don't take the same route as these wearables. We have to make sure that we have some proactive safeguards in place for the mass consumer that are not deep into the science.

All of this then leads to a power shift that people who innovate have the capital, the knowledge to drive the privilege, figuring all this out about us, as well-intentioned as they are also have tremendous power over you. They have the potential to manipulate us.

This is where we think we need additional governance and digital property rights, without killing the innovation. And there are ways to do that. We give lots of examples in the latter part of the book. This includes a safe bank for your genomic information, held safely by an international institution. This is also about privacy and agency-assured data markets. All in all, there are ways to solve all of this, but we have to be proactive about it.