IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017 - 65

commentary

Marcus Wigan

Ethics and
Brain Implants in
the Military

efinitions are a key
factor when discussing the ethics of brain
implants in the military. There is a world
of difference between a permanent
embedded rewritable chip and an
active RFID-managed interface to a
nervous system.
However both variants are under
active experimentation and both deserve to be examined on their merits - or lack of merits.
The working definition of that we
shall adopt is:

4) Implanted device that can directly
enhance some aspect of the persons' capacities - divided into
permanent and removable.
These distinctions are critical for any
ethical discussion to be meaningful.
Once the distinctions are clearly
specified for a specific device or
situation, and once the implied
assumptions have been uncovered,
then the discussion can begin. None
of the questions are trivial. All imply
some of the answers.
The subject of ethics related to
the enhanced soldier has not escaped the attention of philosophers,
or indeed the military. However,
arguments used have been essentially utilitarian or legalistic [13]. A
heartwarming exception is in Shunk
[19] who summarizes his discussion
with a quote from Nietzsche [17],
drawn from Nietzsche's Virtue Ethics phase: "He who fights monsters
should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster."
Ethics and morals can be confused all too easily. Let us take
morals to mean the value system
and behaviors that are acceptable
in a society (clearly a relativist framing), and ethics to be the value systems held by individuals, who must

A brain implant is an implantable device with an interface
to a person's nervous system,
at some point, by some means.
This is still very unsatisfactory,
as induction can be used to make
the bridge between the external
control or communications device
environment and the person, meaning that an actual implant may not
be required even for bidirectional
controls in either direction.
The key distinctions might usefully be classified as:
1) Non-contact communication
with potential control, uni - or
bi-directional.
2) Implanted communications interface controlled internally, but that
cannot be managed by external
entities or devices.
3) Implanted device controlled externally for communication and/or
control of the person.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2654292
Date of publication: 6 March 2017

march 2017

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

make choices. These choices may
sometimes conflict with (societal)
moral judgments.
Our working assumptions map all
too well onto Asimov's [3] framing of
robotic laws. (Asimov then spent 30
stories and novels showing how easily the laws could be undermined, as
discussed in this illuminating reference [3].) The robotic laws address
the ethical issues of enhanced
beings of any kind in relation to
humans. They start with a value that
places humans above machines,
and ends up with machines valuing
themselves in term of survival.
Addressing our subject here of
the ethics of brain implants in the
military then raises the question as
to what kind of an entity a human +
implantable actually IS! Perhaps
a form of robot? Is it a question of
degree, assistive technology? Or a
control system extension?
If the answer is a control system
extension, then all the arguments
that apply to the first widespread
targeted Internet of Things (IoT)
embedded system ma lwa re -
i.e., STUXNET - will be brought to
bear, as implantable (or effectively
implanted) systems are particularly
vulnerable to this form of intrusion.

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