 Let's get started. So I read Elizabeth and Kathleen. I read your stories. I really enjoyed them first of all. And I read them in a lot of interest. And both in different ways unsettled me a little bit, just sort of imagining a future of that kind of real cognitive change. And so I guess my first question for you two is Elizabeth, do you give a story of neuroscience used to control and shape human minds for the sake of essentially protecting people? And Kathleen, you give us one of neuroscience used to really create human foraging and push a path forward. And to me, those can be two sides of the same coin. They can coexist. Absolutely. And I was wondering if you two also saw a way that you can sort of imagine a future where we're using this technology to enhance the human mind in beneficial ways, but also to constrict it in ways that we may tell ourselves are for the good, may or may not be. I will start by giving an example. In one of my former careers, I was a Montessori teacher and I had my own school. One day, probably in 1983, a mother came in and said that her doctor had recommended that she give her perfectly normal to me four-year-old Ritalin. And I said, have you really thought this through? Because I thought it was a really bad thing to be giving drugs to children that young. He was a little wild at times, but all children are. But she went ahead and did it. And I saw a great transformation for the good. And I realized that the drug was settling his brain down enough so that he could actually start to learn how to read and to function in the environment that he was in, simply because his sensory signals previously to the Ritalin were not getting through in a predictable way. And that was what was making him so hyperactive, basically. So at that point, I learned something about a neuro-technology, so to speak, and how it could be used for good. So yeah, I can see all kinds of ways that it could be used for unsavory purposes, especially if it were not the choice, especially if it could not be further controlled by the user. In other words, if someone decided that everybody needs this particular drug and that we ought to take it and that it's in the water, that's not a good thing. And it could be easy to do. Yeah, I'm in violent agreement. I don't think that there is any form of practical neurology. It was the term we were using on the Hieroglyph message boards that isn't a double-edged sword. I don't think there is any way to start externally fine-tuning the human brain that doesn't have profound cultural implications for good and for ill. One of the things that I was thinking about in creating my story is the history of mental health in the Western world. Getting back, even say from the 1850s when we started to have modern conceptions of humane treatment of the mentally ill and attempting to find cures. But those same structures, which in some ways had the best of intentions behind them, have also been used as tremendous engines of social control and oppression. Social justice activists, homosexuals, suffragettes, any of these women and other people who were trying to step outside of their socially constrained roles would find themselves declared mad and sent off to asylums, where they were tortured into submission more or less. We talk about valuable anti-anxiety drugs like Valium, which were used strongly as an instrument of social control in the 1950s. You're unhappy at home, oh, we'll give you Valium. That's not addressing the problem. On the other hand, if you have anxiety about getting on an airplane, maybe that's what you need. So just to reduce it to the very crude level of technology that was available 60 years ago. And when you start contemplating the sorts of hacks we can perform upon the human brain now and the real subtlety of knowledge we're obtaining about how brains work and how personality and creativity work, it is both scary and exhilarating simultaneously. Jonathan, do you have any thoughts on this? Well, maybe a comment about known unknowns. Each of these two edges has another couple of edges. So we're glad that the little boy did better on little one. On the other hand, because it's so hard for ethical as well as practical reasons and financial reasons to do a large-scale clinical trial, we don't know whether he would have done as well on caffeine, which some people prescribe to kids who are ADHD first. And we don't know how old was he? He was four. Oh, well, so we don't know how in the next two or three years he would have adapted to well-known little boys for the most part don't do well in classrooms, structured classrooms, little girls tend to do better. And we also don't know since I teach people at Penn who have been on Ritalin in some cases already for 10 years or more. They're going to be on it perhaps for 20, 30, or 40 years or more or anti-depressants like Zola. This is a big public health experiment. So we don't know what's going to happen with these people. And it's a reason, although we're glad he did better, I wouldn't have wanted it for my four-year-old, I have to say. But there is a certain amount of priority that parents have over their kids. I understand that. Asylum is very interesting. I'm also interested in the history of asylums. So we walk out on the street. And it's what Elizabeth says about asylums, of course, true. There were Packard laws in the late 19th century named after a woman who was found insane by a jury in Ohio. And she was insane because she wanted to leave her husband. So the Packard laws were very powerful for many years. And indeed, many people in this country and, of course, in the old Soviet Union, psychiatry has been and may in some parts of the world still be used to oppress people. On the other hand, we go out on the street and we see people who really need to be in an asylum. An asylum is a good thing. It's become pejorative. But it's actually a good thing for people who really need to be protected and cared for properly. So there are a couple of edges for each of these double edges. So how do we begin? Hopefully, we know as a collective as a society like the history of these things, right? And that's maybe a bit of wishful thinking. But I'd like to think that the people. The historians are still arguing about the history. Right, right. And so knowing what we know about the past and knowing how neuroscience and sort of, I mean, really it's the entire history of science is used to oppress people. How are we, are people working on these advances right now sort of actively grappling with some of the negative potential here? Are they actively trying to create a language for the future of the feeling with the ethical consequences of what they're working on? Except for me. So it's for everyone. Well, can I get to go first? So when I first started getting interested in particular but it doesn't years ago in ethics and neuroscience, especially, I did find it hard to get a conversation going with my friends and colleagues who are scientists. I'm not. And people on neuroscience generally weren't interested in talking about the ethical issues. And that was true. And there are people in this room who know this well, because they themselves have worked on these questions. I think that has changed for a lot of reasons in the last eight years. A lot more conversation about it in this building. I've been part of a couple of national research council committees that have to do with national security and neuroscience, which has really forced the issues more and more into the open. So I think there is a greater appreciation of ethical issues in neuroscience now than there was a dozen of 14 years ago. And many of those issues are not new. So I mentioned drug testing, for example. We had a lot of experience with drug testing. It's not new to neuroscience. Some of the cognitive enhancement issues are a little new. But a lot of that is driven by the particular technology, drug or device you're talking about. But I think there's an openness increasingly, more than there was a dozen years ago, to talking about ethical, social, legal issues in neuroscience, among the neuroscientists themselves. As you had mentioned, it is hard to construct a long-term good study on human beings. And they're often unethical. And as far as good goes, I think most studies are probably bad for one reason or another. So that is not well set up. And so it doesn't really yield the information that you want and need. But one of the issues of ethics that concerns me is the fact that we test so many of our drugs on animals. And what are the ethics of that? There are a lot of animal ethics groups. And the more that we learn about animals, the more we understand that this is a very, very bad thing. So I realize that a lot of good comes out of this kind of testing. The death of billions of rats has led to a lot of what we know today about how our senses work. And yet, at what point does that become seriously troubling to the society that we live in? I think that chimps are no longer to be used for any kind of studies at all. That took place last summer. And that was in the United States, anyway. And that's a very good thing. There's a little wiggle room, though, in that policy. For example, if you couldn't test an Ebola drug on a human being first for various ethical reasons, you can still go to chimps because it's such a public health crisis. So there's a little wiggle room. But in general, what you say is true. And then the interesting question is how far along in the evolutionary chain does that go? Is that the camel's nose? And that's what, under the tent, as it were, and a lot of people in science are concerned about that. But also, it's also true that primates are really expensive and hard to deal with. So for the most part, and more difficulty than we are, especially difficulty. So they're probably not a big area. But I think it is an interesting question about how far down the chain of suffering in evolution are we going to go. It seems to me that there's an entire symposium's worth of, not even a panel, but worth of ethical questions here that interlock. What are the ethical consequences of refusing to treat people who could be helped? What are the ethical consequences of forcing treatment upon narrowly atypical people who don't want it? Elizabeth Moon has a fantastic book about this very topic, Speed of Dark. There are issues of bodily integrity. There are issues of civil rights. There's also the issue of, I hate to sound fluffy, but I'm going to, the issue of personal growth. The kid in your class, possibly in a year or two, he would have developed the skills to exert that control on and focus himself. And the question of where we stop teaching cognitive skills and start going immediately to drugs is a really profound and complicated one. Along the lines of when is it acceptable or when can you sort of essentially mandate the use of these things? The use of these sort of technologies on people I know, Kathleen, in your story, part of the, in the backstory to our future role of universal literature, there's lots of upheaval over this idea that, I think the protesters you write say, like, don't force my child to take this drug. Like, don't force my child to do this and that. Do you, you know, where do you, in this for a drug that results in universal literacy, literacy doesn't mean that it's unquestionably good for an individual. I mean, where do you fall on this? If it's something that is so powerful and has so much potential for good, should it be something that we, you know, strongly say you got to do this, like vaccines? Yes, and of course not as things stand now. And because the drug or whatever, the intervention in my story, which purports to help people with dyslexia read is a magic bullet that doesn't exist because dyslexia is a spectrum of differently-brained people and who is to say that these different brains are not, you know, their own, that they can modify as they wish. So, so yeah, there would be parents who would want their child to have that drug and then there would be parents who would not want their child to have that drug and there are people who would and wouldn't. And of course, I think that it should be a matter of choice but in something like that, if you think of, see, literacy is much different than a vaccine for smallpox. You know, a certain amount of people might get sick or die from a vaccine, especially, you know, from the polio vaccine when it first came out, it was the Salk vaccine or the other, anyway, yeah, the Saban vaccine. And so in the event that it may not be, you know, good for some people, of course you can't do that. So I think that, and there's also the fact that literacy is a very, very powerful thing. And I think that it would cause huge revolutions in the world, it would cause a lot of change when people can get more information about the world in more mediums that are now available. I think, I prefer to read than watch videos because I can read really quickly. I can only watch videos at maybe four times the speed that they're made. So I can take in information much more quickly with reading. And I can access a greater variety in the distant past of what people thought and said. So I think it's a powerful tool for revolution. And so, yeah, those are some of the issues that I think of in that respect. We feel okay with compelling education and military service, ostensibly for the greater good of civilization. I mean, we feel okay societally. Many of us have different opinions on this. Where do you draw the line in, well, okay, I've got a process that can remove sociopathic tendencies. Well, there goes Wall Street, but that's a different problem. The, you know, where do I draw the line in applying that process? Can I have the court's remand criminals to this procedure to, you know, reform them or make them productive members of society? Save on the, save a little money on the corporate industrial jail complex. And then in that case, how is that process applied? We don't have a good record of social justice in terms of applying prison terms, in terms of applying any of these interventions. And then are you applying it punitively or are you doing it in a sense of actual constructive social progress? If you have somebody who is profoundly depressed and suicidal and you have a treatment that will work, you know, has a 95% chance of curing that person, can their family have them declared incompetent and force them to undergo it? I mean, there are so many, and these are things that might have benefit in the long run and they might thank you for it later, but our concept of personal autonomy is not actually based on, well, you'll thank me for it later. I'll just, we're talking about parenting. So how much? You'll be having a child just like mine. So you can suffer. Exactly. So how much parenting is society allowed to do to adult human beings is a really patent question. I don't know the answers to any of these, which is why I write fiction rather than essays. But fiction is a fantastic space for thinking about the intended and unintended consequences of the intersection between biology and culture. So universal literacy read the story. Besides the fact that a whole lot of oppressive societies, especially female oppressive societies would go away, there are also some art forms that will probably also go away and there would be new clever ways of restricting access that states would impose, right? On authorities would impose, even if you can read, we don't get access to certain websites, right? Which we know is already done. I was thinking though about another sort of bringing one aspect of neuroscience home to the two female science fiction writers I'm sitting next to. I have to, when I was a kid, I was a subscriber to the Science Fiction Book Club. I think it was almost exactly 50 years ago that I started that subscription. But who's counting? It was obviously prenatal. And I think I got six books for a penny and it was Asimov and Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. And you never wanted to say Dick, you want to say Philip K. Dick. There were no female science fiction writers when I was growing up. I think we talked about this last night. There were not. Well, I didn't. They wrote on her initials. Yes, indeed. There were a couple of them who were E.M. or something like that. Right, but you didn't know, right? And years later I realized that Mary Shelley, she started the first big science fiction movement. So there's that thought that it's very interesting for me to be here with two science fiction writers who are women. I also had another thought last night as one of my graduate students at Penn is a historian of science who's working on the fact that for the last 35 years or so, neuroscientists have interested in the question whether there's a gendered brain. Or male and female brains different. And she's working on the development of this question among neuroscientists as a historian. So this is not settled. Oh, it's quite unsettled. It's a huge debate. Leads me to the question, do women write science fiction or think about the future differently for men? Not all women, of course, there's a big overlap. If it turned out that there was a gendered brain which is unsettled, and if we could have a drug that could make me think more like a woman than a man, or maybe write, if I were a writer of science fiction, more like a woman than a man, could I take some of that stuff and write a story and see if it'd be a little different? I think the gender is a social construct for one thing. In part, not entirely. No, not entirely. And in the 60s, I was, and for a long time, the idea was that, of course, everyone's brain is different. That's one thing I'm coming to realize and the other thing is that, the thinking is that everyone's brain is the same, male or female, and so what's this all about? So when more research started coming out, saying that female brains are probably different than male brains, which is usually code for not quite as good, I was a little bit irritated and this is an excuse to limit the education of women, usually, in various ways. But to get back to the question, when women became more visible, there were always women in science fiction, and I know this because I've had access to deep research on this book that I'm writing a conclusion to right now, but they were written out by men. Sometimes, like Fred Pole, who was married to three science fiction writers, at one point said, no, women weren't writing science fiction in those days, in the 40s, 50s. It's just strange, you know, it's like, oh, it all kind of dropped out in my mind what my wife was doing all that time. But because, you know, I really liked Fred. That explains why there were three of them, doesn't it? Yes, exactly. But when women became more visible in science fiction, say in the 70s, there was the impression that women were destroying science fiction, that they were not writing about science, that they were doing soft science fiction about psychological issues or something like that. Yes, they're not, you know, engineering, they're not physics, you know, they're not rockets, we're writing about human beings and relationships. So I think stylistically as a writer, that's what I tend to write about, but I was asked to write a story about space exploration last week, last year, and I thought, well, I don't know much about rockets, I don't know if I'm gonna do this, and then I thought, you know, I know a whole lot about rockets, I know a lot about Werner von Braun, I know a lot about the history of rockets, and things like that. So I went at it at that angle, but I will give it over to Bear because we are starting to have limited time. I'm just gonna say very quickly that women have been writing science fiction for a long, as you say, and in a lot of cases, we don't know the gender or race of early authors because they existed as a signature on a contract. Yeah, the other thing is that there's so much social bias in how stories are read that it's almost impossible to tell objectively what's going on. Charlie Strauss and I can write stories with approximately the same amount of romance and hand-wavium and crunchy scientific bits, but when I do it, it's spec thick, and when Charlie does it, it's hard science fiction. We both remarked on this because we're sort of at the same level in where we're tackling the amount of science and our social criticism, but he's a hard science fiction writer and I'm only occasionally a hard science fiction writer for what it's worth. Anecdata. I think it's time for Q and A, so if you have questions and hand one up first. He's pointing at you. Point at you? Oh, you're looking like who, me? Thank you. Hi, Kevin Bankston. We've been focused on considering the audience and the panel. I wanted to also talk about computers. Common sci-fi, trope, and what will likely be a reality at some point, although when exactly is unclear, is brain-computer interfaces. However, if that technology is anything like, say, internet technology now, it will be riddled with insecurities, could be hacked, could be used to surveil you, could be in the hands of the wrong people used as a tool of social control. This has been talked a lot about in science fiction, I'd say most recently, a plug for a science fiction writer, Rahmez Naam, who's written a great series about some brain-computer interface technology and raises these issues. So I just wanted to ask the panel, ethical or unethical, avoidable or inevitable? If the technology had comparable security to the internet we have today, is that something we want to put in our brain? Thank you. The blue screen of death, you know? It really sucks when you're driving a car. It's a very well-made point and we do have brain-computer interfaces, I mean, direct brain-computer interfaces, not your kids sitting in the backseat with the iPad. But you're being used medically right now, things like deep brain stimulation and some people who have what they call locked-in syndrome, who have been able to communicate using implants. It's pretty amazing stuff. And in terms of prosthetics or controlling really profound depression, we're having some success with this stuff right now. I personally think that anything that can be hacked will be hacked, but on the other hand, there are a lot of people who have worried about automobile computers being hacked and sabotaged and it doesn't seem to be a real problem currently. So I don't know how much of that is paranoia and how much of it is an abundance of caution. I don't know. That's his job under the bus. I think, you know, DBS for Parkinson's symptoms works well for some people for a while. The brain-computer interface stuff is highly mediated. The few experiments there are, it's EEG and TMS and the internet, much more mediated than your relationship to your iPhone. So, you know, it really cool in the laboratory, probably teaching us something about the brain, but I'd have to see the device that was gonna take us to the next step that you might have in mind. I haven't seen it yet. And I would think it would be an entirely new paradigm that it would be much more biological than what you're thinking of as being a computer right now. And distributed, you know, throughout your body, perhaps. And, you know, that's one of the easy images that come to mind, you know, the nanobots or whatever, which would actually be organic in your body, giving information about your health and, you know, what's going on and perhaps even moving to fix it in real time. But I think to associate the issues that we experience with our phones and laptops with intimate devices that are in the body is technically a stretch and a great subject for science fiction because it's a really cool idea and, you know, to think about those issues and to extrapolate what may or may not happen and how strange and weird is society will become. I was interested in the phenomenon of body hacking. Some people are putting in implants themselves. One gentleman can feel electrical fields. That's a choice that he made, but how do you think that's going to change the human brain and what are the ethics of that? Yeah, I'm a neuro skeptic about these things. I think it's really interesting. I think we'll, 10, 20 years from now, we're gonna see this as kind of a blip on the screen. Whatever's going on now is, it's pretty cool. People have been doing this for a while. There's a professor in the UK who's got a thing that lights up when he's near his wife and, you know, it's around her neck and so forth. It's very nice. I'm glad that works out for them. But she's got an implant under her finger that broadcasts. Okay, it's great. But I think I just don't, I don't see that as going, I don't think that's the pathway to whatever's gonna happen particularly. There's some artists doing some cool things, but that's not something, that's an innovation. That's not something that's gonna be disseminated widely. I don't think. But just a guess. I do think that implantable sensors for our physical condition are going to be very tempting within a decade or so. People are gonna think that's great. It's like in my car, I can know what's going on in my car, I can know what's going on in my body all the time. Until people discover that there's very little they can actually do about their medical problem, their deterioration with aging, for example. Not much intervention. You can do a lot of those things yet. So if a lot of you don't know what's going on, then it is to actually do an intervention that is therapeutic. Well, and are you gonna trust iCloud with that data? Because, you know, the other really salient question there. I was struck by somebody mentioned the typological, mistakes you make on the keyboard, which can be known and clearly over 30 years, I'm gonna make a lot more mistakes than the next 30 years, God willing, than I do now. So you're gonna be able to maybe track dementia over a vast population. If you do the data aggregation by seeing how many mistakes people make. I think there are people who are actually working on exactly that. Wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. In terms of body hacking, I think it's a bodily integrity issue. It's your own business. I don't see any, it's like getting your ears pierced. You get to decide if you're gonna do that. Hi, thanks a lot. I'd be interested for you to be more explicit about a sort of meta-level issue here. Of what do you think the role of science fiction should be in forming ethical and policy debates? Did you think about that much when you're writing your stories? Well, you can almost imagine a world where for any given policy or ethical issue, you try to commission a lot of science fiction that helps explore it from a variety of different perspectives. So how would that work? Yeah, that's, I'm sorry, I'm gonna turn. So my mic's in the right direction. That's exactly what I see my job as, actually, is having ethical arguments with myself and public. Yeah, at first I thought, well, this is kind of odd because I look at on literature as being entertainment, basically. And there was an editor who profoundly shaped science fiction in the 40s, John W. Campbell. He basically would tell the authors, like Heinlein, what kind of idea he wanted them to develop in a story and how you should go about it. But there was not any of that with this anthology. I was free to choose my own idea. I was free to develop it in my own way. And I think that it is something that science fiction writers think about profoundly all the time. So usually the issue for me is how to not be preachy. How to let it seem like a real story with a real protagonist, with real issues, how to frame it so that it works as literature as well as information, a set of possibilities. A set of possibilities is what science fiction is usually about. So that's the way I approached it. And I think, from all the stories that I've read in the anthology, that that's pretty much how it turned out. Maybe I have time for one more question, so back there. So I'm wondering to the extent that you've thought about sort of scientific positivity, positivism here. So many of the things that you've been talking about in terms of homosexuality being persecuted as a psychiatric disease or women being treated with hysteria, for hysteria using Valium, are things that the more we know about the brain, the less likely we are to make those sort of errors because there's no empirical basis for them. So I'm wondering if you can discuss that a bit. I think it was social change rather than neuroscience that resulted in the changed attitudes that you just mentioned. So I don't know if there's anything about hard neuroscience that led us in the direction of having more appropriate attitudes toward those populations. In fact, I think the jury is out about how neuroscience is gonna help us or make it more complicated dealing with, for example, violent offenders. That's a big problem because if it does turn out that there are actual, some of my colleagues think that there are some actual identifiable metrics. The kid who starts to pull the leaves off the fly when he's six years old is gonna progress to actually beating up the disabled kid on the playground at age 16. Some people think that you can actually be able to see that when the kid is younger than six even. And if that's true, then what kind of intervention would be appropriate and how much could we require, again, parents to do? Take them out of class, give them special medication. So here we get into minority report kind of territory. I think that, so I don't think we've seen the neuroscience implications yet dealing with different kinds of ways of living. I think we will, but we haven't quite gotten there yet. Yeah, I think that we don't, as he says, I don't think that we know enough about the brain we have the Brain Initiative now in the United States, which is great, and they're handing out money to different projects. I read about one today. And then in Europe they have their own big brain project or there's a blue brain project. And so I think that this will yield a lot more usable information. And I think that being aware of this research because research doesn't give you any technology, it's just information. So then the way that technology goes is often commercial. So that will be one thing that we will have to look out for. And yeah, the more information we have the more wisely we can use it. But I think that as information kind of dribbles in, it can be totally misinterpreted and used in ways that are inappropriate and dangerous, unethical and the like. Yeah, as both of my esteemed colleagues have said, there's the danger of confirmation bias. You, people will gravitate toward the research that seems to prove what they want to believe. And we pretty much all do this, even those of us who try to be self-aware about it. And oppressive systems are the most reinforcing of confirmation bias because their oppression reinforces their power. As Kathleen was talking earlier about, well all the things about female brains being different seem to say that they're not quite as good. So there is a danger there as well. And I will quickly add that in the 70s, was it the 60s? Well, I think it was in the 70s. Nixon had a gold star panel of physicians evaluate marijuana and to see if it was a bad and dangerous drug. Well, it was to him because he blamed it partly on all of these young people causing a revolution. And so he ignored all of that information and had marijuana scheduled as a schedule one drug. No research has been done in the United States on its properties in human neuroscience, the rest of the body since then. And so there's also politics to consider. And with that, I think we're done. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.