Stavroula Pabst explores the race to apply emerging neurotechnologies, such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in times of both war and peace, expanding conflicts into a new domain — the brain — while perhaps forever changing humans’ relationship with machines.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink made headlines earlier this year for inserting its first brain implant into a human being. Musk says such implants, which are described as “fully implantable, cosmetically invisible, and designed to let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go,” are slated to eventually offer “full-bandwidth data streaming” to the brain.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are quite the human achievement: as described by the University of Calgary, “A brain computer interface (BCI) is a system that determines functional intent – the desire to change, move, control, or interact with something in your environment – directly from your brain activity. In other words, BCIs allow you to control an application or a device using only your mind.”
Developers and advocates of BCIs and adjacent technologies emphasize that they can help people regain abilities lost due to aging, ailments, accidents or injuries, thus improving quality of life. A brain implant created by Swiss-based École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (EPFL), for example, has allowed a paralyzed man to walk again just by thinking. Others go further: Neuralink’s goal is to help people “surpass able-bodied human performance.”
Yet, great ethical concerns arise with such advancements, and the tech is already being used for questionable purposes. To better plan logistics and boost productivity, for example, some Chinese employers have started using “emotional surveillance technology” to monitor workers’ brainwaves which, “combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, [can] spot incidents of workplace rage, anxiety, or sadness.” The example showcases how personal the technology can become as it is normalized in daily life.
But the ethical ramifications of BCIs and other emerging neurotechnologies don’t stop at the consumer market or the workplace. Governments and militaries are already discussing — and experimenting on — the roles they could play in wartime. Indeed, many are describing the human body and brain as war’s next domain, with a 2020 NATO-backed paper on “cognitive warfare” describing the phenomenon’s objective as “mak[ing] everyone a weapon…The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.”
On this new “battlefield,” an era of neuroweapons, which can broadly be defined as technologies and systems that could either enhance or damage a warfighter or target’s cognitive and/or physical abilities, or otherwise attack people or critical societal infrastructure, has begun.
In this exploration of the race to apply the latest neurotechnologies to war and beyond, I investigated how the neuroweapons of tomorrow, including BCIs that may allow for brain-to-brain or brain-to-machine communication, have the capacity to expand conflicts into a new domain — the brain — while also bringing a new dimension to both hard- and soft-power struggles of the future.
In response to ongoing neurotechnology developments, some allege “neurorights” will protect peoples’ minds from possible privacy infringements and myriad ethical issues that new neurotechnologies may pose in the years to come. However, neurorights advocates’ close proximity to the very organizations advancing these neurotechnologies deserves scrutiny and potentially suggests that the “neurorights” movement is poised instead to normalize advanced neurotechnologies’ presence in daily life, perhaps forever changing humans’ relationship with machines.
The Military–Intelligence Complex’s Decades-Long Pursuit of Neurowarfare
Indeed, neuroscience’s very origins lie in war. As Dr. Wallace Mendelson explains in Psychology Today, “Just as American neurology was born in the Civil War, the roots of neuroscience are embedded in World War II.” He explains that while the bond between war and neuroscience has contributed to meaningful advances for the human condition, like the improved understanding of ailments like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it has left some worried about neuroscience’s possible military applications.
Controversial yet well-known government attempts to learn more about the brain include Project Bluebird/Artichoke, a 1950s era project that worked to determine whether people could be involuntarily made to carry out assassinations through hypnosis, as well as the especially infamous MK Ultra, where human mind control experiments were carried out in a variety of institutions in the 1950s and 60s. These projects’ respective conclusions, however, did not signal an end to the US government’s interest in invasive mind studies and technologies. Rather, governments internationally have been interested in the brain sciences ever since, investing heavily in neuroscience and neurotech research.
Initiatives and research explored in this article, like the BRAIN Initiative and the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N³), are often portrayed as altruistic strides towards improving brain health, helping people recover lost physical or mental abilities, and otherwise improving quality of life. Unfortunately, a deeper look reveals a prioritization of military might.
Enhance…
The military is intensely interested in emerging neurotechnologies. The Pentagon’s research arm DARPA directly or indirectly funds about half of invasive neural interface technology companies in the US. In fact, as Niko McCarthy and Milan Cvitkovic highlight in their 2023 writeup of DARPA’s neurotechnology efforts that DARPA has initiated at least 40 neurotechnology-related programs over the past 24 years. From the Interfacedescribes the current state of affairs as DARPA funding “effectively driving the BCI research agenda.” As we shall see, such projects, many of which focus on somehow enhancing the capabilities of the recipient or wearer of a given piece of technology/augmentation, are making activities like telepathy, mind-control and mind-reading — once the stuff of science fiction — at least plausible, if not tomorrow’s reality.
As McCarthy and Cvitkovic explain on their Substack, for example, the 1999 DARPA-funded Fundamental Research at the [BIO: INFO: MICRO] Interface program led to significant “firsts” in brain-computer interfaces research, including allowing monkeys to learn to control a Brain Machine Interface (BMI) to reach and grab objects without moving their arms. In another project from the program, monkeys learned how to “position cursors on a computer screen without the animals emitting any behavior,” where signals extrapolated from the monkey’s movement “goals” were “read” and decoded to move the mouse.
McCarthy and Cvitkovic also highlight that, in more recent years, DARPA-funded scientists have also “created the world’s most dexterous bionic arm with bidirectional controls,” have used brain-computer interfaces to accelerate memory formation and recalling, and have even “transferred a ‘memory’ (a specific neural-firing pattern) from one rat to another,” where the rat receiving the “memory” almost instantaneously learned to perform a task that typically took weeks of training to learn.
In any case, it’s curious that “equitable access” to cognitive augmentation is being legislated upon through “neurorights initiatives” without substantive debate as to whether such augmentation should be allowed in the first place or is even safe.
Ultimately, rather than protect people from the possible ethical harms of emerging neurotechnologies, neurorights legislation ultimately appears poised to normalize and facilitate the arrival of BCIs and other advanced and often dystopian neurotechnologies discussed in this investigation into daily life.
Neurowarfare: Another Step Towards Transhumanism?
Altogether, ongoing strides to enhance, and in turn, degrade or destroy warfighter capabilities on the battlefield through tools like BCIs and other implantables, neuropharmocologies, and even efforts to augment cognition may well transform the nature of warfare, kinetic or otherwise, as militaries put the brain front and center in conflict.
Touted as a way to sidestep the possible ramifications of these technologies, “neurorights,” which have been proposed by persons closely affiliated with the organizations creating the tech in the first place, ultimately appears to be about normalizing the tech and introducing it to and integrating it within the public sphere.
Critically, the increased and growing presence of neurotechnologies for use in daily life could well normalize and accelerate efforts towards transhumanism, a dystopian goal of many amongst the power elite to unite man and machine in their push for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a revolution they claim will blur the physical, digital, and biological spheres. After all, if technologies that can read minds, make prosthetic limbs “touch,” or use thoughts to control machines become everyday tools, it seems the sky’s the limit with respect to how humans could use them to transform societies — and themselves, for better or for worse.
Ultimately, such efforts towards transhumanism are being pushed from the top with little room for meaningful public debate. These efforts are also often intertwined with ongoing pushes towards stakeholder capitalism and efforts to hand decision making processes and common infrastructure to an unaccountable private sector through “public-private partnerships.”
Indeed, in light of such advances, both sovereignty and humanity is under attack — on and off the battlefield.
Stavroula Pabst is a writer, comedian, and media PhD student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Athens, Greece. Her writing has appeared in publications including Propaganda in Focus, Reductress, Al Mayadeen and The Grayzone. Keep up with her work by subscribing to her Substack at stavroulapabst.substack.com.