How Tech Looks Into Your Brain w/ Professor Nita Farahany | The Rob Montz Show

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In 2020, Zoom casually rolled out a new feature for businesses. It tracked employee eye movements during meetings and alerted their boss if they weren’t paying attention. Scrolling or dozing off during this week’s performance review? Zoom registered -- and reported -- your boredom

I learned about that story from Nita Farahany, a professor at Duke law school. Professor Farahany is the foremost champion of the concept of “cognitive liberty,” the right to the space in your skull free from unwanted intrusion.

"So it's a right to access and change your brain if you choose to do so," she says. "And it's the right from interference with your brain and mental experiences."

And Zoom’s brain snitching is just the mildest form of modern cognitive surveillance.

As she explains, "employers already across the globe have required people to wear headsets that track their brain activity... What they can decode is your reaction, your brain state reaction. Is it positive? Is it negative? Are you happy or sad?"

Professor Farahany worries that rapidly advancing A.I. processing power combined with near universal camera coverage could bring a world where outsiders can easily extract information you thought was safe within your skull.

"If you can take a person's face, look at their brain activity, see the facial movements, and be able to decode a lot of what they're thinking and feeling, suddenly, that kind of one space that people thought they had for freedom, which was mental privacy, is collapsing."

0:00 - Intro

04:29 - The MINDS Act

06:23 - defining "cognitive liberty"

09:39 facebook's newest product reads your neurons

13:30 how ai uses your facial movements to look inside your skull

17:43 zoom's ill-fated feature that detected employee boredom

20:51 some employers already require workers to wear mind-tracking devices

23:51 aren't these technologies all opt-in? why worry?

30:11 how entertainment normalizes cognitive surveillance

33:49 are we all suffering brain damage from our devices?