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Ethics in Artificial Intelligence—CSC484

Professor Clark Elliott

Human memory transfer?

In a proof-of-concept experiment, in 2013 Deadwyler at al. transferred information-encoding patterns from the hippocampus of a trained "doner" rat via electronic information transfer and electrical stimulation into the brain of a non-trained "recipient" rat. The recipient rat showed benefits from the donor rat's training.

Other studies have suggested that RNA altered by experience helps store the memories of organisms, and that these memories can be passed from one organism to another via RNA transfer.

Given the explosion of interest in (a) neuroscience, (b) epigenetics and (c) materials science—such as with graphene inserts for brain-machine interfaces, how long will it be before human memories can be stored electronically and uploaded (a) at a later time and, (b) to more than one indivdiual both human and artificial?

What are the implications for privacy and individuality? Now we have real HIPPA concerns...