Keynote Presentation: A Cross-Contextual Approach to the Ethics of Neurotechnologies w/ Live Q&A

Neurotechnologies come in a wide variety of forms in order to provide assistance and therapy for a wide variety of needs and conditions. These neurotechnologies are used in complicated social contexts. Understanding how neurotechnologies create ethical challenges for the people who rely on them is difficult because of the complexity of both the technologies and the social contexts they impact. In this presentation, Dr. Tim Brown (University of Washington School of Medicine) will propose a framework for understanding these ethical challenges through the technical and social contexts at the same time. Brown will then use this framework to consider difficult, near-future ethics problems—like how big data and artificial intelligence will impact patients, their communities, and medicine more broadly.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Clarify how ethics issues arise from the components of neurotechnologies.

2. Locate the social contexts within which ethics issues arise.

3. Adopt and apply a new framework for tracking ethics issues across contexts.