Lyreskog David M, Zohny Hazem, Savulescu Julian, Singh Ilina
Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, University of Oxford, Warneford Ln, Oxford, OX3 7JX UK.
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Neuroethics. 2023;16(1):12. doi: 10.1007/s12152-023-09516-3. Epub 2023 Mar 28.
A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing and swarming technologies promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks across domains, ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications. As these tools continue to improve, we are prompted to monitor how they may affect our society on a broader level, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other key concepts of our moral landscape. In this paper we take a closer look at this class of technologies - Technologies for Collective Minds - to see not only how their implementation may react with commonly held moral values, but also how they challenge our underlying concepts of what constitutes collective or individual agency. We argue that prominent contemporary frameworks for understanding collective agency and responsibility are insufficient in terms of accurately describing the relationships enabled by Technologies for Collective Minds, and that they therefore risk obstructing ethical analysis of the implementation of these technologies in society. We propose a more multidimensional approach to better understand this set of technologies, and to facilitate future research on the ethics of Technologies for Collective Minds.
目前，越来越多的技术正在被开发出来，以改善和传播思维与决策。脑对脑接口技术和群体技术的快速发展有望改变我们对跨领域集体和协作认知任务的思考方式，这些领域涵盖从研究到娱乐，从治疗到军事应用。随着这些工具不断改进，我们不仅要关注它们在更广泛层面上如何影响我们的社会，还要关注它们如何重塑我们对能动性、责任以及道德领域其他关键概念的基本理解。在本文中，我们将更深入地研究这类技术——群体思维技术，不仅要看它们的应用如何与普遍持有的道德价值观相互作用，还要看它们如何挑战我们关于集体或个体能动性构成的基本概念。我们认为，当代理解集体能动性和责任的主流框架在准确描述群体思维技术所促成的关系方面存在不足，因此有可能阻碍对这些技术在社会中的应用进行伦理分析。我们提出一种更具多维性的方法，以更好地理解这类技术，并促进未来关于群体思维技术伦理的研究。
