Neurotechnology: Current Developments and Ethical Issues | Hacker News Reader

Neurotechnology: Current Developments and Ethical Issues

frontiersin.org

51 pointsQuinzel27 comments

I haven't read the paper because I consider Frontiers Media a shit-tier publisher. Their acceptance rate is 90%. A few institutions don't consider their papers when judging the performance of researchers. The National Publication Committee of Norway doesn't consider their papers to be "academic".

Sorry for attacking the medium rather than the message. I just feel that more people need to know about the shady practices of Frontiers.

There are some great Frontiers journals and plenty of amazing papers. Here is some nuance:

“As of 2022, 96 Frontiers journals are listed in the Norwegian Scientific Index, two of which are rated 'Level 2' (top 20% of all journals in the field), and more than 88 journals has been rated "Level 1" (standard). academic journals), 1 journal has a rating of Level X (probably predatory), and 5 have a “Level 0” (non-academic) rating.”

https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/frontiers-medi...

I think this particular article doesn’t look credible. And the whole “Opinion” type probably shouldn’t be published in journals, just post your opinion on Twitter.

That being said, I know for a fact that publically funded Norwegian research is published in Frontiers and researchers from Norway do consider those to be real academic journals.

One of the coauthors is a professor of Philosophy specializing in the field of Neurotechnology. Given that an academic journal is at least partly "peer-reviewed" let laymen post their opinions on Twitter and academics on... journals.

Nice to see someone is paying attention.

Thanks I didn’t know that. I’ve read them with an interest in neuroscience. Can anyone suggest a better alternative

Pretty much anything in elife or nature communications for open access journals, or neuron, nature neuroscience for non open access. You can almost always find biorxiv preprints for closed access pubs too.

You can always check the impact factor of the journal you’re accessing, and their acceptance rate etc… it can give an indication of the credibility of article published, as well as the journal.

such prejudice, I really really hope you're not an academic ethicist

I once went deep into rabbit hole of why neurotechnology progresses so slowly.

My conclusion was that it’s a chicken and egg situation. Tech advances depend on what we know about human brain and what we know about it is constrained by ethical concerns

Here’s the full write up https://notes.invertedpassion.com/Consciousness/Why+brain-ma...

"constrained by ethical concerns" glosses over "chimps that we test on die at horrific rates" pretty hard.

if we are just chemical reactions writ in meatspace, then where's the room for "ethical considerations" except as performative nod to the illusory problem of pain and death?

/speaking sarcastically about hard materialism, of which I am simultaneously a critic but also recommend to be the universal null hypothesis

That is quite the statement, sarcasm aside. I guess I need to read more on hard materialism. These sound like folks you probably don’t want to chat with at a dinner party.

You don’t find enough hard materialists on HN?

Not many that are ethically bankrupt.

Neurotechnology is coming way faster than most people expect, especially with AR/VR headsets (EEG) and wristbands with electrodes (EMG), which are pushed hard by Meta, Apple & co.

I wrote a few notes about it: https://kerkour.com/nobody-cares-about-the-metaverse-neurote...

Some of us didn't budge when entire nations, media, tech and security forces were trying to lock us down, denying are movement and associatio rights and trying to coerce us into taking things that presented no health benefit based on a played up risk profile.

We'll be okay not wearing the shit they push. You CAN say no.

That's a very self-congratulatory way to say "I intentionally coughed on people in WalMart"

Yours is a self congratulatory way to say "I pretended to follow the rules and buried my head in the sand".

It's all you can do, really. Can't really argue the insanity of the policies because we've been proven right time and time again. It's just the public needs to "move on and forget".

Keep living in fear every time they tell you to. It's not pathetic at all.

The trend of employing optogenetics and optogenetic-like functional tech to this problem I find frightening. And keep in mind "opto" isnt just visible light.

The other big idea (which the paper mentions) is the coupling of systems being sensed. For example in the medical research they now couple fMRI (bloodflow) with EGG (coarse firing activity) and also EGG with pulsed ultrasound neuromodulation. This is interesting because the metabolic process is almost a "mind if its own".

Why is this frightening? Because of the use of viral vectors or some implication of interfacing with the brain more effectively?

I reckon you could do some cool things with mice and neural implants and large language models.

Find a way to semi-automate the process of fitting the neural implant, and you should be able to do science a lot faster too.

Nothing will depress you more than showing VCs how those on academic probationary can literally lift themselves to academic achievement only to be told “people don’t care about education” “who is actually going to spend money on this” “sounds nice but hardware is just too much” “keep in touch” etc —-

This technology is waiting for its Mike Markkula - the person who can shepherd neurotech’s next generation founders. Without his early leap of faith, marketing influence, and savvy capital, I’m convinced Apple wouldn’t have made it out the garage - who will be neurotech’s?

but transhumanism is ideologically corrupt!

Neurotechnology involves more stuff that the article depict. It shows the author doesn't really know about the topic. One missing examples is transcraneal estimulation [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5180077/

I was researching AI-enhanced BCI's a while ago, and this was an article I stumbled upon.

Looks like this should say (2017)

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