NTMAI-19: (Clinical) Neurotechnology meets Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical, Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Institute for Ethics, History and Theory of Medicine, LMU Munich Munich, Germany, May 8-10, 2019 |
Conference website | https://neurotechmeetsai.wordpress.com/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ntmai19 |
Submission deadline | January 15, 2019 |
Imagine the coffee machine starts to brew your urgently needed morning coffee as soon as you think the command “start the coffee machine” while still in bed. Is that realistic? Is it desirable?
Neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are no longer a futuristic dream or, depending on the viewpoint, a nightmare. They are subject of many research projects and their usability improves rapidly. Today, BCIs represent an important tool for a wide range of medical applications. For instance, they enable otherwise disabled patients to communicate by using a computer via brain activity. Beyond the medical context, they are used in the entertainment sector and developed for business applications. Moreover, it appears that with a similar technological apparatus of a brain-to-brain interface, a human brain can also be coupled with another human brain in order to transfer brain activity from one brain to cause brain activity in the other brain, e.g. to stimulate a movement.
At the same time, BCIs and other neurotechnologies stand in a relation with another emerging technology that cuts across many domains of technology use, i.e. Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI itself raises a host of original problems that can most aptly be summarized as “black box”-problems: It becomes increasingly difficult to supervise and control an AI’s operation because it manages its decision-making logic itself.
The conference brings together a wide range of scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds (philosophy, law, social science, cognitive sciences, medicine) to discuss the multi-dimensional philosophical, ethical, legal and social implications of neurotechnology and AI.
Submission Guidelines
We invite scholars who wish to contribute to the conference to submit an extended abstract with max. 1.000 words. Presentations should be confined to 20 minutes presentation, followed by 20 minutes Q&A. We particularly wish to encourage young scholars to submit their work. The conference will be held in English.
Deadline for submission is January 15, 2019. To submit an abstract, please visit http://bit.ly/neurotechsubmissions and follow the instructions provided. Acceptance notifications will be sent out no later than January 31, 2019. If accepted, the authors will be required to submit the final paper ready for review by March 31, 2019 at the latest.
List of Topics
The use of neurotechnologies and AI in combination elicits some further pressing philosophical, ethical, social and legal concerns. Possible topics for submissions could include, but are not limited to, the following questions:
- How can we conceptualize agency, moral and legal responsibility and autonomy in intelligent neurotechnologies?
- What implications do BCIs and, even more so, BTBIs have for the concept of acting together?
- What consequences result in terms of mental privacy?
- Where is the normative borderline between curing illness, addressing disability and human enhancement, and what does it imply?
- What anthropological implications do neurotechnologies have?
- Are there particular legal or normative worries regarding the medical use of neurotechnologies?
- What are potential domains of application beyond medicine, e.g. the military? What are the ethical, legal and social implications in these contexts?
- What broader social implications result from the use of neurotechnologies in general
Organizer
The conference is organized by the project INTERFACES. The project has partners in Germany (Munich, Hamburg), Spain (Granada), and Canada (Montréal). It is an international transdisciplinary project to investigate ethical, legal and social implications of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). INTERFACES is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research – Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction (CIHR-INMHA), the Spanish National Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Germany, respectively.
Publication
Selected papers will be invited to contribute to a volume to be published later in 2019.
Venue
The conference will be held in Munich, Germany (Institute for Ethics, History and Theory of Medicine, LMU Munich, Lessingstr. 2, D-80336 Munich).
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to andreas.wolkenstein@med.uni-muenchen.de. For further information please also visit http://bit.ly/neurotechmeetsai