Algorithmic Regulation: A Compatible Framework for AI and DTC Neurotechnologies

Publication Title

Brains and Machines: Towards a Unified Ethics of AI and Neuroscience

Editor

Marcello Ienca & Georg Starke

Document Type

Contribution to Book

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

As direct-to-consumer neurotechnologies begin to enter markets around the world with much promise and concern, conversations remain ongoing around how AI products and services may affect societies and shape behavior. These debates in AI offer productive and complementary concepts for scholars addressing common governance questions in neurotechnology such as data protection, identity, autonomy, and rights. In this chapter, we argue the concept of “algorithmic regulation”—advanced by Yeung in 2018—can offer fresh perspectives to neuroethics and studies of neurotechnology governance. Algorithmic regulation as a lens primarily examines how digital technologies “regulate” individuals and societies by shaping, enabling, and constraining behavior, preferences, and values.

Especially as neurotechnologies become increasingly data- and software-driven, while DTC products and data begin to operate in a global marketplace, algorithmic regulation offers a good fit for opening analysis around not only ethical and regulatory issues around neurotechnologies, but also political economic questions. We connect and compare neuroethical conversations around, for example, personality and identity to algorithmic regulation scholarship examining how existing digital and big data-based tools already alter or erode autonomy and enact new forms of surveillance. In turn, neuroethical studies can contribute back to algorithmic regulation by guiding analysts to consider further how the use of highly sensitive data and intimate digital-biological connections can raise new or modified political and regulatory questions for how technology regulates people and populations.

Recommended Citation

Lucille Nalbach Tournas & Walter G. Johnson, Algorithmic Regulation: A Compatible Framework for AI and DTC Neurotechnologies, in Brains and Machines: Towards a Unified Ethics of AI and Neuroscience 143 (Marcello Ienca & Georg Starke, eds. 2024).

DOI

10.1016/bs.dnb.2024.02.008

Volume

7

First Page

143

Last Page

159

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS