The Battle for Your Brain

Outline

The Battle for Your Brain (2023) warns that brain-tracking technology is quickly moving from the lab into everyday products such as earbuds, headbands, and workplace devices. Nita A. Farahany explains how data from our brains could be used by employers, governments, and companies, and why this threatens privacy and freedom of thought. She proposes a new legal right to cognitive liberty to protect the last private space we have: our minds.

• Brain-tracking technology is moving out of laboratories and into everyday products like earbuds, headbands, and workplace devices.
• Data from our brains could be used by employers, governments, and companies, not only by the person who generates it.
• Brain data collection threatens both personal privacy and freedom of thought, since the mind has always been our last private space.
• Farahany proposes a new legal right to cognitive liberty to protect mental privacy and autonomy.
• Understanding how AI and brain technologies work is the first step toward protecting your own mind.

Nita A. Farahany is an American legal scholar and ethicist and a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University. She is one of the world’s leading experts on the ethical, legal, and social impact of emerging technologies, especially neuroscience and artificial intelligence. She has advised governments and international organisations on technology policy, and The Battle for Your Brain is her best-known book.