Increasing brain-computer interface media depictions: pressing ethical concerns

ABSTRACT

This article explores how brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are depicted in the English-speaking media, especially by news outlets. We use the FACTICA database to analyze depictions of BCIs from the first time the term appeared in the media (1993) up until 31 December 2017. We found a sample of over 4064 articles on BCIs. Results indicate that 76.91% of articles portrayed BCI positively, including 25.27% that were overly positive, while 26.64 % of the total articles contain claims about BCI-enabled enhancement. In contrast, 1.6% of articles had a negative tone and only 2.7% of articles flag issues explicitly related to ethical concerns surrounding BCI technology. We propose: 1) A proactive effort by the scientific community to push-out to the media stories focused on the limits and actual capabilities of BCIs, separating science from science fiction; 2) More influence should be brought to bear on the technological risks and process of informed consent.

KEYWORDS:

• AI
• Bias
• brain-computer interfaces
• enhancement
• ethics
• media
• news

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Neuroethics team at the University of Washington.

Availability of data and materials

There is an Excel spreadsheet summarizing the results of the systematic literature search and evaluation as well as any calculations performed. It is available at reasonable request from the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

FG research is funded by the Australian Research Council (DECRA award Project Number DE150101390) from the National Science Foundation (NSF Award #EEC-1028725). We gratefully acknowledged the Mary Gates Endowment for providing CP with a scholarship. JNMV is supported by a Tasmania Graduate Research Scholarship, an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, awarded by the University of Tasmania.