TED Radio Hour - Prophets of Technology: The Biotech Visionaries

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

As AI infiltrates every aspect of our lives, who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point? In this special three-part series, you'll hear from the people predicting and shaping our tech future. Host Manoush Zomorodi reports on the latest and revisits her favorite conversations with the minds crafting the digital world we live in today: what they've gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we're headed next. Part 3 features biochemist Jennifer Doudna, neurologist Tom Oxley and legal scholar Nita Farahany.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find.

Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR.

I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. This is the final episode in our three-part series with The Profits of Technology. We've been talking to the inventors and scientists who've predicted and shaped the digital world we live in today about what they've gotten right and wrong and where they think we're headed next. In part one, we talked to tech pioneer Ray Kurzweil and the original influencer Stuart Brand.

In part two, Microsoft AI's Mustafa Suleiman and MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle gave us very different takes on AI and chatbots and the intensifying emotional relationship we'll have with our technology. Today, we're exploring a new chapter for the human body. as we enter an era where the boundaries between biology and technology are blurring, from our genes to the merging of the brain and devices. We begin with the story of a Nobel Prize winner and an acronym that you have likely heard a lot over the past few years. CRISPR, or clustered, regularly interspersed, short palindromic repeats. Wow, impressive. Did I get it?

Okay, thank you. You did. Thank you. I have been working on that. I'm really glad you came up with the acronym. Well, I didn't, but the field did. Yeah. This is biochemist Jennifer Dowdna.

Around 2011, Jennifer started collaborating with a French professor named Emmanuel Charpentier. And they began studying CRISPR, a phenomenon that naturally occurs in bacteria. Correct. It's an adaptive immune system that bacteria employ to protect themselves from viral infection. And we began studying an enzyme of protein called CRISPR-Cast-9, which could be incredibly useful for detecting RNA and DNA molecules and for cutting them up. She and Emanuel found that this CRISPR-Cast-9 molecule destroys viruses by cutting up their DNA and altering their genome. Their discovery was huge. And this led to a breakthrough, really a, a...

a finding that this system could be harnessed as a tool, as a technology for manipulating DNA sequences in a programmable fashion. And it was through that work that we realized that this system could, in fact, be deployed as a genome editing tool. Meaning they could use CRISPR-Cast9 to target and alter specific genes. It was basically immediately clear that this was an extraordinary breakthrough technology. Do you remember what it looked like when you sort of connected the dots? Were you like, whoa, I have to sit down or I need a whiskey? Like what went through your mind on a purely human emotional level? Well, a great little vignette that comes to mind was an evening in those days when I was, you know, I had just come home from the lab.

And, you know, we had just gotten the data that showed how this worked. And I was at home. I was, you know, I was cooking spaghetti in my kitchen for my young son. And I just suddenly burst out laughing because I thought, this is so crazy, you know, that we started working on this thing. Didn't really know where it was going. And it certainly wasn't a popular area of science at the time. Most people had never heard of CRISPR.

And yet we had uncovered this just. absolutely extraordinary molecule whose chemistry was going to probably change the world. Jennifer Dowdna and Immanuel Charpentier's work earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. And now CRISPR is starting to deliver on its big medical promises. In late 2023, the FDA approved the first ever CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell disease. It works by tweaking a patient's own stem cells so that their body starts making healthier blood. More recently, doctors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia used a CRISPR treatment on a baby born with a rare metabolic disorder, delivering the gene fixed directly to his liver, making him the first person to get customized genetic therapy.

Researchers are also testing CRISPR as a one-time fix for high cholesterol by editing a single gene linked to heart disease. After years of hope, CRISPR is getting out of the lab and into real lives. Victoria Gray, she was actually the first U.S. patient to receive a CRISPR-based therapy for her sickle cell disease. And, you know, she's showing that this type of approach can actually work quite well in terms of treating a disease at its source. And I think that's really what CRISPR offers is that kind of a cure, really, for genetic disease. But I think one has to think about the fact that, you know, what we're talking about here is effectively changing evolution. You know, it's changing us at our core and going back to the instruction manual that makes us who we are and making changes there. When we talk about it in the context of a disease like sickle cell disease that is so debilitating, it certainly seems like this might be.

something that some families might want to consider eventually, especially if the technology is vetted carefully and shown to be safe. But I think the broader issue really is equity, access to technologies, who decides about something like that, something as profound as that, who pays for it, who has access to it. I think it gets complicated quickly. Yeah, I mean, it goes from stopping a fatal disease to maybe optimizing for IQ or even, you know, being thin and tall and having a particular eye color, I suppose. I mean, in a most extreme case, you could imagine that someday couples, you know, go to an in vitro fertilization clinic and they receive a menu, right? And they can decide what types of traits they want for their children. Yeah, you actually brought

that up back in 2015 in your TED Talk. Imagine that we could try to engineer humans that have enhanced properties such as stronger bones or less susceptibility to cardiovascular disease, or even to have properties that we would consider maybe to be desirable, designer humans, if you will. Right now, the genetic information to understand what types of genes would give rise to these traits are mostly not known, but it's important to know that the CRISPR technology gives us a tool to make such changes once that knowledge becomes available. This raises a number of ethical questions that we have to carefully consider, and this is why I and my colleagues have called for a global pause in any clinical application of the CRISPR technology in human embryos to give us time to really consider

all of the various implications of doing so. In 2015, Jennifer called for an international moratorium on applying CRISPR to human embryos, at least until the scientific community considered all the ethical implications of gene editing. But not everyone stuck to a moratorium. Overnight an astonishing claim. A scientist in China saying he created the world's first genetically engineered babies. A line has been crossed. That should not have been crossed.

It's very disturbing. It's inappropriate. Oh, this is huge. That was definitely a motivation at that time was to call to the attention of everyone to just be aware that this technology does have the potential to create these very profound kinds of changes in human beings. What happened next was that there was an announcement in 2018, which actually happened at the second International Summit on the topic of human genome editing. of a project in China in which two embryos had been edited using CRISPR and then were implanted to create a pregnancy that resulted in the birth of twin girls with edits to their DNA. And do you remember what your reaction was after he presented his research?

Well, it was pretty horrifying. You know, it was just kind of shocking to see the way that the work had been performed. just really an example of unethical behavior on the part of a scientist, you know, just rushing forward with something before it had been tested to be safe and also without properly understanding how to how to explain and consent with patients, you know, to explain to them what was actually happening to the embryos that they were using in the study. And so I think it really did galvanize the international community to realize that this type of work really shouldn't be happening right now. And there has been a concerted effort on the part of not only scientific organizations,

but also by the World Health Organization and the United Nations to get involved in this conversation. Okay, so you've got governments and NGOs talking. But of course, there's the other party that we're not talking about yet, which is private enterprise. There are a lot of companies who are hoping to make money off of this technology. You've started several companies that are developing CRISPR-Cast9 treatments, but should we be worried? Because companies are not always known for taking the moral high ground, right? You're right, that I think this is always something that needs vigilance. One has to, you know, you can't relax. You have to remember, you know, there's always the risks that go along with the technology like this. But companies play.

an incredibly important role in all of this because generally this is not something that academic labs have the funding or the resources to do. And that's where companies come in. So how do you balance your business interests with your ethics? I think it begins at the beginning. You have to start with creating a culture in your team that focuses on ethical use of the technology and the benefit that can be created by developing it in the context of the company. I've been proud of the teams that I've been involved with as a founder that I think in each case, these are people who I like, I trust. I think we have aligned values, core values, in terms of both doing excellent science and doing it with an eye towards ethics and appropriate use of a powerful tool. Those capabilities

will advance, you know, the kinds of things that have only been dreamt of in biological systems to a point where we can actually achieve them. Imagine that someone gets a diagnosis for something. Maybe it's even pre-diagnosis. It's they get their DNA sequenced and the result comes back that they have susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease in the future. Imagine in the future it's possible to use a technology. like CRISPR to change those genetics so that that person is no longer has that susceptibility.

That would be extraordinary if we get to that point. Will we get there in 30 years? I don't know, but I think it's entirely possible that we will. That's biochemist Jennifer Dowdna. You can see her TED Talks at TED.com. In a minute, we'll turn from the body to the mind and the people predicting what will come next for how we think. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR and part three of our special series,

The Profits of Technology. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. And this is part three of our special series, The Profits of Tech. We're talking to the inventors and scientists who have predicted and shaped the digital world we live in today. And asking them where we're talking to the inventors and scientists who have predicted and shaped the digital world we live in today. And asking them,

they think we're headed next. Today we are focusing on the human body. Right now, it's not unusual for someone with heart problems to get a pacemaker or someone with hearing problems to get a cochlear implant. But what if it becomes totally normal for someone with physical limitations to get an implant in their brain? There is a race going on to develop neural implants, or as they're called brain computer interfaces, BCI's. The Wall Street Journal estimates that fewer than 100 people with paralysis have had one of these devices permanently implanted. But many clinical trials are ongoing, and the companies jockeying to get ahead each have

their own approach to putting technology inside the brain. One of the least invasive approaches comes from vascular neurosurgeon Tom Oxley. And I'm the founding CEO of Synchron, a brain computer interface company. Tom's company makes the stent road, a brain implant to help people with neurological diseases who can't move their bodies or speak. So this technology is a way to put almost what is a microphone right on top of the brain and bypassing the inability of the body to transmit out your intention or your will to move. In 2020, they started testing their device in people, including a man named Philip O'Keefe. Philip was the second participant in our first inhuman study of our implantable brain computer interface. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

And Philip has ALS or motor neuron disease. And he was facing a progressing loss of control of his body as the ALS. less progressed. So if your muscles stop working, but your brain is still working, you can, in a sense, become trapped inside your head. Basically, the technology decodes what part of the body the brain is trying to activate and then sends out a signal that makes a cursor move or a computer mouse click. Yeah, so you're able to directly manipulate a mouse or a keyboard by thinking about trying to move, even though your body is no longer moving. Almost like a Bluetooth mouse directly controlled out of the brain

that can work on any system. Philip started off doing simple tasks using his BCI, like sending an email and browsing the web. But after a year, he wanted to take things to the next level. So he sent out a tweet. The first tweet said, Hello World. That was what it meant to him.

He was saying hello back to the world because he'd gone quiet. he'd gone dark and he was back. And that's really what this technology is about. Philip O'Keefe can't use his fingers to type like you are, but thanks to a tiny brain implant, he was able to send the following tweets. Here's Tom Oxley on the TED stage.

Hello, world, short tweet, monumental progress. No need for keystrokes or voices. I created this tweet just by thinking it. My hope is that I pave the way for people to be able to tweet through thoughts, Phil. Now, you might be thinking there are some people out there who should not be allowed to tweet directly from their brain. I agree. But for people with paralysis and disability, this technology can be life-changing. They will fill up brain signals up on the screen. They're connected to their computers via Bluetooth. The device is fully internalized, invisible to the outside world. And they learn to control the keyboard with clicks directly coming from their brain.

Now, BCI's conjure up images of science fiction like The Matrix with a cable jacked up into your brain through a hole in your skull. But I'm here to show you that the future can be much more elegant than that. Do you remember the first time that you heard about brain computer interfaces? Because people have been trying to do this for a while, right? The first report of a human implant was in 2006 by Lee Hochberg and colleagues in nature. And I was immediately besotted with the idea that this was going to be a transformational technology. I went into medicine because I loved the brain. It was this mystery and romanticism about what the brain was, how it worked, how it generated consciousness.

And then you realize that there's not many things that you can do for neurological disease. You can't reverse the death of neurons. You can't replace neurons. And I realized that this is a field in medicine which is sort of behind the other areas of medicine and ability to treat conditions. And it struck me that the ability to directly interface with the brain was going to change that. Because up until then, what scientists had been trying to do, they had to go directly, like, drill a hole and put a device in people's brain.

Is that what the challenge was? Yeah. The breakthrough early research device is. a series of needles that sit on a base and those needles get pushed into the brain tissue and they are able to record information out of the brain. There's an issue with putting a needle into the brain and that is that it can cause a inflammation reaction. The brain does not like to be invaded. The brain has an immune response which is different to the rest of the body. You can put a tattoo under your skin and it will not cause a huge inflammatory reaction but you can't do that necessarily

on the brain. So my concept was, well, how do we avoid putting something directly into the brain? What's the next closest we could do? And the idea that we had was, let's try and solve getting these senses into the blood vessels, and it can stay there for a lifetime. The blood vessels are the natural highways into the brain. These are hollow tubes that connect every corner of the brain. The largest vein at the top there is right next to the motor cortex, the exact part of the brain that we want to connect to to restore control to the outside world. Now, we already know how to travel through the blood vessels.

If anyone here today's had a heart attack, there's a pretty good chance you've had a stent. A stent is a metal scaffold, delivered through a catheter, which opens up like a flower into the blood vessel. Millions of stents are delivered each year not in the OR, but in the cath lab or catheter laboratory. It's now common in the cath lab to navigate up into the brain through the blood vessels. But what's really amazing about this is that for BCIs,

we already know that devices can be left inside a blood vessel, cells grow over it, incorporated into the wall like a tattoo under the skin, and we're protected from that immune reaction. So you've basically built a brain computer interface into a stent. And you place it not just in the brain, but in the brain's blood vessels, right? Yeah. It's extraordinary. Can you take me through that process?

The procedure involves putting a catheter into the jugular vein in the neck, then slipped up inside the skull through a little pre-existing hole that the jugular vein goes up. So it's kind of going up the drain pipes of the brain. So you carry your way up through those pipes all the way up into the brain until you sit on the blood vessel that's sitting right on top of the motor cortex. And what we had to solve was how do you put sensors, how do you build an electronic circuit onto that stent? So then that device opens up. It sits in the blood vessel.

It's connected to a cable. That cable exits that point in the neck and the jugular, and it plugs into a device in the chest that sends the information from the brain wirelessly out of the body. So if you were to look at the patient with the device in, you wouldn't know that it was there. Okay, so once the stent has been put in, do you just think something and out it comes onto the keyboard? How do you, do you have to train the patient in order to use their mind effectively to communicate through technology? The patients do, underage.

go training. What's interesting is that we are born in bodies where there's a part of the brain attached to a muscle and that's all that part of the brain does. So if you make a fist right now, there's a very particular part of your brain that's firing to do that. But once you digitize that, you can apply what used to be a particular movement, say closing a fist or putting up your finger or bending your elbow and the patient will realize that that performance, you can apply. And the patient will a particular task on the computer. And then in a different mode of action, it does a different thing. So probably a good example is thinking if you've ever played a video game with a Nintendo

controller or a PlayStation controller. When you first start playing a new game, you have to look down on the buttons. And the button might jump or fire or do something in the game. But in a different game, it'll serve a different purpose. So in each different game, you have to learn what your fingers are doing when they hit the button. And for the first couple of attempts, you'll be watching your fingers, but then eventually you'll stop looking because you'll just know what it does and you'll stop thinking about it. So it's the same concept. We have a belief that the first brain computer interface should be very easy to use.

It should be robust. It should require very little training. You shouldn't have to spend weeks or months learning how to use it, and it should work as soon as you turn it on. Synchron recently announced a collaboration with Apple to build devices for people who can't use their hands. And while controlling our tech with our minds is probably still years away, the concept doesn't sound quite as far-fetched as it once did. One of the most famous people who's in this brain computer interface field is, of course, Elon Musk. And he has laid out a vision where people control all kinds of things with their minds.

virtual reality games, but also way more than that. He's talking about the brain fusing with artificial intelligence. Are you thinking of those things, too, where it's not just for people who have medical issues, but for anyone who wants to enhance their mind? I watch Netflix and I read science fiction novels and I can see that there's a likely outcome where this technology progresses into humans being able to control things in a way which wasn't previously possible. The thing is that we're talking on a very long time scale, and I think it's important for people to remember that this technology is critical for people who have lost the ability to engage in the world.

So I just worry that the conversation goes into a hundred-year-out time frame, and we start looking at all the possibilities of how this, could go wrong and we forget why actually we're doing this right now and who is it for. You know, I'm not dismissing the ethical considerations for where this goes. Like, I've seen Black Mirror and I think the answer to that is let's confine the problem right now to what is needed to really help people and lay down a really strict regulatory framework about, you know, remaining in that domain. I mean, that's the thing, right? It's a, it's a Venn diagram of medical device and Silicon Valley utopian maybe out there futurism. And I mean, your company, it's a for-profit

company. You've taken venture capital. And presumably your investors would like you to move as fast as you possibly can with this and scale it. So I guess I'm wondering, when do the ethical considerations, like when does that conversation start? Because we've seen it start way too late with so many other technologies in the past? I mean, you're right. The conversation has started for us. We have a ethical charter. We have a group that's set up. We have internal conversations about this a lot. We're talking with the FDA and we've been in close contact with them and continue to discuss these issues in an ongoing basis. I think the community's taking it very seriously. The kind of Venn diagram into the tech utopia, I think our investors are investing because they

see that there is a huge unmet need in the medical domain for paralysis. Now, I mean, one other thing that I'd probably add to it is, if I was to think ahead about what it might look like into that tipping point and who would be the people in the consumer world that would start to do this, the corollary I think about is LASIC surgery. LASIC surgery started 30 years ago and it's a laser on your eyeball and it makes you see better. this is a procedure that's a day procedure. You have to go into a hospital. You have to see a physician.

It's regulated by FDA. But if your visual disturbance is only mild, you can still go and do that, and you can take on the risk and benefit to get that done. I think BCI might go in that direction. I'm not saying next year, this is probably like on a 15-year horizon, but once the technology is demonstrated to be safe and effective,

and it's in a day procedure and it's invisible to the outside world, there probably will be a portion of society who think, well, I would like to be able to engage in systems without having to touch anything. So I don't have to hold my phone. I can see that as a possibility. In the future, I'm really excited about the breakthroughs BCI could deliver to other conditions like epilepsy, depression and dementia. But beyond that, what is this going to mean for humanity? What's really got me thinking is the future of communication.

Take emotion. Have you ever considered how hard it is to express how you feel? You have to self-reflect, package the emotion into words, and then use the muscles of your mouth to speak those words. But you really just want someone to know how you feel. For some people, with certain conditions, that's impossible. So what if rather than using your words, you could throw your emotion just for a few seconds and have them really feel how you feel? At that moment, we would have realized that the necessary use of words to express our current state of being was always going to fall short. The full potential of the brain would then be unlocked. Mentioned just how many mysteries there still are about the human brain and how our minds work.

Where are we now in that understanding? I mean, it feels like, you know, we've mapped the human genome. That was exciting. We're now starting to hear about people getting genetic treatment. where are we with the brain, with our minds? For me, the huge mystery is the unconscious. We've for the most part mapped the brain and understand it, but we have not figured out how the random, chaotic, unconscious world

that exists when we're dreaming interacts with our day-to-day life. I started psychiatry and I decided not to do psychiatry because I didn't feel like we fully had a biological or physiological framework to understand why people were suffering. But I still don't feel like we've really cracked how the unconscious works, and we haven't integrated that into a clear physiological framework yet. And so I'm on a journey right now. I think BCI has been incredible,

and it starts to equate to a reverse engineering of how the brain works, and the brain works similarly in different parts, and we're learning that now. But I'm hoping that over our lifetime, we're going to have major breakthroughs in the ability to integrate the whole mind. which includes the subconscious and the collective unconscious. I think it's going to be a really interesting 50 years to unlock those mysteries.

That's Dr. Tom Oxley. He is a neuro-interventionist and the founder and CEO of Synchron. You can see Tom's full talk at TED.com. Coming up, if technology has access to your brain and body, how do you make sure that your thoughts and actions are still your own? It's not that hard to see that we're quickly moving into a world where what you're thinking and feeling is just as transparent and can be just as easily decoded using AI and neurotechnology. We'll hear from legal scholar Nita Farahani on why she thinks we need to protect our emotions and ideas legally. There's still a part of us we hold back, right? There's still these thoughts you have, the way you react.

act and feel that isn't expressed in your text messages and your GPS location data. And that's the part that I fear that when we get to this world of brain transparency, if we don't have the right kind of safeguards in place, that that, which I think is so fundamental to what it means to be human, what it means to flourish as a human, may suddenly not be our own. I'm Manusse Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour's Prophets of Technology series from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Anoush Zomerode. You've been listening to our special three-part series, The Prophets of Tech. And we want to end things now with a look at our ideas of civil liberty. Do these ideas need to evolve as we enter this new era of devices combined with AI

that can enhance and influence our bodies and minds? As we heard Tom Oxley say, it will likely be many years before neural implants are safe enough, cheap enough, and effective enough for able-bodied people to risk getting brain surgery for the purpose of putting a device inside of it. But the era of brain monitoring and enhancement has already begun. Many of us use apps that guide us with meditation or focus exercises. EEG headbands have been on the market for years, smartwatches, and earbuds are also being developed to monitor and modulate our brainwaves.

But who gets access to all that mental information? Earlier this year, Montana became the third state after Colorado and California to pass a law that protects people's neural data, information that's directly measured from a person's nervous system, from being misused by companies. But going forward, Duke Law professor, Nita Farahani, wants us to think much, bigger about how we can protect our most private ideas and thoughts. So, I mean, there are brain sensors that pick up electrical activity in the brain. Major tech companies are really racing to embed these brain sensors to be like the heart rate sensors and other sensors we have in everyday objects, but tracking something very different,

which is being able to tell if a person is happy or sad or if they're paying attention or their mind is wandering or if they're bored or engaged, tired of falling asleep at the wheel, for example. There are companies like SmartCap that have been selling these EEG headcaps that allow a driver or a pilot or somebody who's in mining, for example, to track their fatigue levels and give more accurate data about whether they're starting to get to dangerous levels of sleep. I mean, this sounds cool, easier. But where do we start to the line between technology understanding our intention based on tiny movements or brain activity to understanding our thoughts and ideas and our feelings.

Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, there was this amazing study that came out from some researchers at UT Austin, led by Alex Huth, where using more sophisticated neurotechnology, which is like these giant, you know, MRI machines that a person goes. into. They, you know, had people listen to podcasts and then trained a generative AI classifier to say like, this is what the person's listening to, this is what their brain activity looks like, this is what they're listening to, this is what their brain activity looks like, and then had them listen to something and have the classifier try to decode what

that was. And it was with a really high degree of accuracy, able to decode a lot of what the person was hearing or what they were imagining, just based on brain activity. And so the question of where does it cross the line, as you're starting to wear everyday devices, you know, earbuds that are tracking your fatigue levels or picking up your intention to type or to swipe, but it's recording that brain activity at all times. And these models are getting more and more sophisticated at being able to decode what that means. it's not that hard to see that we're quickly moving into a world where what you're thinking and feeling is just as transparent and can be just as easily decoded using AI and neurotechnology. And that's the part that I fear that when, you know, we get to this world of brain transparency, if we don't have the right kind of safeguards in place, that that, which I think is so fundamental to what it means to be human, what it means to flow.

flourish as a human may suddenly not be our own. Here's Nita Farahani on the TED stage. This new category of technology presents unprecedented possibility, both good and bad. Consider how our physical health and well-being are increasing while neurological disease and suffering continue to rise. 55 million people around the world are struggling with dementia, with more than 60 to 70 of them suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nearly a billion people struggle with mental health and drug use disorders.

Depression affects more than 300 million. Consumer neurotech devices could finally enable us to treat our brain health and wellness as seriously as we treat the rest of our physical well-being. Regular use of brain sensors could even enable us to detect the earliest stages of the most aggressive of brain tumors like glioblastoma, where early detection is crucial to saving lives. The same could hold true for Parkinson's disease to Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury, ADHD, and even depression. But all of this will only be possible if people can confidently share their brain data without fear that it will be misused against them. You see,

the brain data that will be collected and generated by these devices won't be collected in traditional laboratory environments or in clinical research studies run by physicians and scientists. Instead, it will be the sellers of these new devices, the very companies who've been commodifying our personal data for years, which is why we can't go into this new era naive about the risks or complacent about the challenges that the collection and sharing our brain data will pose.

Brain sensors provide direct access to the part of ourselves that we hold back, that we don't express through our words and our actions. Brain data, in many instances, will be more sensitive than the personal data of the past because it reflects our feelings, our mental states, our emotions, our preferences, our desires, even our very thoughts. These aren't just hypothetical risks. Take EnterTech, a Hangzu-based company who has collected millions of instances of brain activity data, as people have engaged in a mind-controlled car racing,

sleeping, working, even using neurofeedback with their devices. They've already entered into partnerships with other companies to share and analyze that data. I mean, what's your biggest fear here, Nita? What is the worst-case scenario if we don't start to put some legal safeguards around this tech? I think, honestly, that human flourishing is at risk. care. Like fundamentally what it means to be human is at risk. So for me, you know, what I've been talking about is our right to cognitive liberty, our right to self-determination over our brain and our mental experiences. And what I mean by that is like fundamentally, you're right to develop your own identity, your own thoughts, like to have a space where you're able to reflect, to think,

to, you know, think about being a child and trying to sort through who you're, you know, you are. I have a third grader, so an almost nine-year-old. And watching her, you know, more and more come into her own and trying to figure out who she is, all of that happens in the safe space, the safe space of mental reprieve. You know, in one of the most jarring things, I think, in researching my book I came across was, you know, the classrooms in China where children were being required to wear headsets that track their brain activity. to track their attention levels throughout the workday. And the thought of a child, kind of no matter what that headset can or can't pick up,

but the chilling effect that that has on the ability to think freely, to be able to develop your own internal sense of self, to, you know, to dare to think differently at an age where it's so hard already to go against the norm, that's the space that I worry about us eroding, getting to a place where people, you know, are afraid to even think. And if we are afraid to even think freely, the capacity to be able to figure out who you are

and to, you know, dare to dream big or to dare to, you know, help us change the path in the course of humanity or your own path in life is compromised. When I hear you say that, It makes me particularly worried because I think we're talking about technology that will be very subtle, right? Like you know when I tap something or I swipe something, but if I think something or if someone is collecting a brainwave, that seems very discreet. It's very discreet and hidden and invisible. So one of the risks I worry about is a lot of times with an emerging technology, especially a whole new class of technology.

it becomes normalized and hidden in ways that we can't see. So, you know, just to give you an example of that, some of the places in which these EEG headsets have been introduced already are, you know, places like you go into an IKEA store to look at a series of rugs and you're given a headset and told, like, only if your brain can prove that you love the rug, are you going to be able to take it home? This actually happened.

What? Yeah, they had this mark. marketing gimmick in Brussels where they had these limited edition rugs. They were worried that the kind of idea of these limited edition rugs was to bring art to people at a reasonable price and people were buying them and reselling them on places like eBay. And so they ran this marketing campaign where you had to wear an EEG headset while looking at the rugs to prove you loved the rug. And if you did, you could take one home. And if you didn't, you couldn't. Like we can laugh at that. in so many different ways, like it was clearly a marketing gimmick, but it normalizes it, right?

You encounter technology in situations, novel technology in situations that are non-threatening, that are invisible, you don't realize what's being collected. And suddenly we've breached this category of giving away, you know, our most intimate selves without even realizing that we're doing so. And, you know, I don't think people realize what that world might look like. It's not just that you've given up your mental privacy. You've given up the keys to who you are to be able to mentally shape and change you. That's happening already with algorithms, but the ways in which this can happen so much more precisely and so much more in a customized way, I worry about a world of more almost brainwashing of people in ways that really limit our ability to think freely. Unless people have individual control over their brain data, it will be used for micro-targeting or worse,

like the employees worldwide who've already been subject to brain surveillance in the workplace to track their attention and fatigue, to governments developing brain biometrics, to authenticate people at borders, to interrogate criminal suspects' brains, and even weapons that are being crafted to disable and disable.

orient the human brain. Brain wearables will have not only read but right capabilities, creating risks that our brains can be hacked, manipulated, and even subject to targeted attacks. We must act quickly to safeguard against the very real and terrifying risk to our innermost selves. These technologies don't exist in silos, but in combination affecting our brains and mental experiences. So somebody listening is like, okay, I don't want that future. Tell me what to do right now. What would you say? Well, I'd say the first place that I've been advocating that we address is like a system of laws.

And that's not just because I'm a law professor. I think it's because we're starting in a world in which the balance is not in favor of individuals. We've gotten to this place where like the collection of data is the norm. and so the balance is in favor of the tech companies, and we have to reclaim some of that power for individuals. And in the past year, a lot has happened. So UNESCO has launched a new project around trying to develop ethical guidelines around neurotechnology. The UN has a committee that's putting together a report on neuro technologies and its impact on human rights.

And a lot of the AI legislation that's been happening and the conversations that have been happening, some of those have started to recognize the convergence of these fields and include some, you know, specifics around the processing of biometric and personal data. But there needs to be a lot more convergence between the AI conversations and the neurotechnology conversations. And so I've been advocating for a global right to cognitive liberty, a right to self-determination over our brain and mental experiences. And that really just, that's a framework to update three existing human rights, which is, our right to privacy, to explicitly include a right to mental privacy, the right to freedom of thought to more explicitly cover a right against interference and manipulation and punishment for our thoughts, and the right to self-determination, which has been recognized as a collective and political right to also be an individual right. It feels like we are hurtling towards an era where man and machine are merging in many ways. I agree with you.

How do you think about it? So, you know, I think of it as kind of co-evolution. Huh. The way I see that is human thinking is relational. And so, you know, our technology and our dependence and interdependence on technology is increasing, which means our relational thinking with respect to technology is being shaped and changed with that technology. I want us to be more in the driver's sense. of that. Actually knowing what's happening with that co-evolution and to be able to drive that co-evolution,

rather than the technology in the hands of a few powerful people, deciding how our brains are relationally going to change with respect to that technology. And I think this is a whole category where it has such a huge implication for how it could reshape what it means to be human, that it's so important that we get it right. That was Nita Farahani. She's a law professor at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. You can see her full talk at TED.com.

Thank you so much for listening to our special Prophets of Technology series. Our hope is that the sum of this series is greater than just one conversation, that it's a map of where we've been, and a preview of what might be next. The scientists, technologists, psychologists, and legal scholars we heard from viewed time in a very unique way. Some of them think in decades, others in evolutionary arcs, but they all see technology as more than a tool.

It is always changing the human experience. And so the key thing for me is that we don't default to think, thinking that innovation and progress are inevitable or beyond our control. We are not destined for the most optimistic or dire predictions. But to ensure our tech reflects our humanity more than just market demands, we the users need to stay curious, stay critical. If you missed parts one or two, please go back and listen. I think you'll enjoy it.

And if you're a fan of the show or enjoyed the series or you have feedback, please leave us a comment on Spotify or a review on Apple. We read them all and love hearing from you. Thank you. Our show today was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and Harsha Nahada. It was edited by Sanas Mashkampore and me. Our TED Radio Hour team also includes Katie Montalione, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Giron, and James Delahousie. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer, our audio engineer. were Robert Rodriguez and Simon Jensen.

Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Danielle Bella-Rezzo. I'm Manus Shomerode and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.