How Advancements in Neurotechnology Will Indelibly Change Marketing (and Society)

Toward the end of last year, I became aware of how neurotechnology will reshape advertising. Imagine a future wherein brands gather data about consumers’ thoughts in real-time through wearable devices like watches and headphones, and then act on that data through personalized experiences. 

It’s not hard to see how advertisers would use this information to enhance their respective relationships with customers and their profits. It’s the next iteration of what social media platforms like Meta and TikTok do – gather personal information and exploit it to sell products via addictive algorithms. Except, in this scenario the algorithm is trained on data directly from our brains.

This dystopian future felt alarming, but I consoled myself that neurotechnology capable of powering our ad-landscape was a way off. It turns out, I was wrong. 

In The Battle For Your Brain, Duke University professor and technology ethicist Dr. Nita Farahany presents a very different picture of the current state of affairs. Not only is advanced brain-mapping technology on the horizon for marketers – it’s already here. Companies like Meta and Microsoft have made large investments in this area, and new advancements in artificial intelligence thanks to generative AI have fast-tracked this dystopian reality. 

I sat down with Dr. Farahany to talk about her book, the ethical and legislative considerations of advancements in this field, and how and when it will reshape consumers and society. Here’s what’s on the horizon.

The promise of neurotechnology is astounding. 

Dr. Farahany has dedicated her career to studying and educating about the impacts of emerging neurotechnology and it’s clear that she’s passionate about the promise of the innovation – especially when it comes to mental health.

“As a scholar studying the development and implications, I see one of the biggest promises of brain sensors as improvements in brain health,” says Farahany. “Our overall physical health and wellbeing have improved over time, and we have a great deal of information about our overall physical health, whether that’s from a doctor’s office or wearable devices. The same isn’t true for one crucial aspect of our physical health – which is our mental health. There are more than 55 million people who suffer from dementia and over a billion who suffer from mental health and drug use disorders. The ability to have real-time and continuous monitoring of brain health and wellness could be a very positive thing for human flourishing.”

Advancements in the field are making actionable mental health data available for practitioners and individuals, enabling a wave of research and innovation into how we can expand our understanding of brain experiences to support mental health.

What about for brands and consumers?

Farahany suggests that advancements in neurotechnology also make good business sense, which increases the risk of greater employee surveillance. Understanding brain patterns when employees shift their attention, for example, could be perceived by businesses as a way to be more efficient with their project management.

Moreover, brain wearables could be transformative for the way people interact with the rest of their technology–whether in their everyday lives or in the workplace. For example,enabling people to develop code, purchase products, or otherwise transact through the power of thought could “promise a more natural way to move through life,” she says. 

As a marketer with knowledge of the ad landscape, I can’t help looking at innovation through this lens. Imagine a not-so-distant future wherein we can search the web, add a colleague to our LinkedIn network, or make purchases with our thoughts. Executed well, the promise of personalized advertising and easy and valuable consumer-brand interactions is exciting – if it wasn’t also so terrifying.

And the threat is equal weight.

The bulk of Farahany’s book is a warning that we need to be thoughtful about deployment of these emerging technologies and push for legislation in order to protect access to the last private domain that’s available to us – our thoughts and mental experiences. 

“I think [the positive promise of neurotechnology] assumes individual use and individual control of the data, and unfortunately the introduction of these devices is in the context of the companies that have not respected the data over time. The sensitivity of the data doesn’t suggest that it will be used [in service to public good],” says Farahany.

 “We’re creating a new world order of brian surveillance, marked by the loss of mental privacy and the loss of freedom of thought. The access of corporations and governments to our brains and personal experience [threatens] to punish people for what they’re thinking,” she continues.

Farahany’s book documents how governments are already using these technologies for biometrics. Moreover, the notion of deploying neurotechnology in our digital ad landscape means these profoundly consequential technologies will be beholden to the incentives of our ad-supported internet. 

Put another way, we know that collecting and monetizing private personal data is a big and murky business that has serious consequences from mental health crises to political polarization. And we’ve never had access to more intimate information than our thoughts. If history hints at what’s in store in an unregulated environment with unmitigated access to our private mental experiences, it’s not good news for public good. 

So, what about regulation?

Surely, with such high stakes, we’ve made some significant headway in Washington, right? Wrong.

“Regulation is in infancy,” says Farahany. “There is momentum from organizations like UNESCO and the OECD in recognizing the importance of rights and regulations, but the problem is much broader than neurotechnology. The solution is more of an umbrella concept to understand how technologies work together for cognitive liberty.”

In other words, meaningful regulation requires an overarching approach to the advanced technology landscape, which is tricky, given that the vast majority of our representatives don’t have a background in technology and managing this kind of innovation requires global alignment. 

Farahany spends much of her time trying to shore the gap. She served on the U.S. Presidential Commision for the Study of Bioethical Issues and writes and speaks about implications of neurotechnology advancements worldwide. She points to positive conversations that are starting internationally to try to wrap our hands around this issue. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time. 

The horizon for deployment

In fact, the technology is already being widely used. 

“This technology is already used across society and across the world,” says Farahany. “This is now just an issue of scale. We have a moment to get this right, but if we don’t, it’s going to go the same way as our larger data environment. This data will be misused and used in ways that are discriminatory and harmful to people. These aren’t just hypothetical risks, but we still have time.”

I asked Farahany about a specific timeline for these technologies to scale. Headphones and ear buds capable of of portably tracking some kinds of brain activity will be available at scale in the next few months. Months. And Meta’s watch, which is similarly capable of recording brain data, is scheduled to be unveiled by 2025. 

“This is a game-changer for larger advertisers,” says Farahany. “They will all move quickly to acquire or adopt these technologies.”

The emergence of generative AI

I was curious about how generative AI might impact the horizon for neurotechnology. I was both amazed and horrified by what I learned. 

“The power of neurotechnology comes from the miniaturization of the sensors, and also from the power of AI to decode what brain activity actually means,” says Farahany. 

Given recent advancements in AI, what researchers thought was impossible is now being realized: the ability to track and decode fleeting thoughts through mental imaging like fMRI. 

“Most people believed that fMRI was too slow for the data that it captures. It wasn’t very good at picking up something as rapid as speech. But [with GPT-1] it is startlingly accurate, much better than any machine learning algorithm,” she says.

Farahany mentions that a new way of decoding has entered the field, thanks to GPT-1, the early iteration of OpenAI’s generative AI that powers ChatGPT. The astounding implication is that generative AI can make this kind of accurate and rapid thought-tracking and decoding possible portably. 

“The stable diffusion model was startlingly better than any prior decoding, showcasing the use of generative AI as a new way to decode speech and images from the brain.” 

Conclusion

The advances in generative AI make the capabilities and risks of these innovations more precise. You can imagine an immersive experience where your environment is being constructed in real-time with generative AI. “There can be a closed loop system where your brain is used to generate what you see or to calibrate to change it,” says Farahany.

But how might humans behave when they know their thoughts are being tracked and analyzed, and what will organizations and governments do with that information? Will humans start to censor their own thoughts? How will we feel about the data that we come to understand about our thought patterns? And most crucially, how will these technologies be used at the expense of human flourishing?

The creative in me is excited and astounded by the possibilities. But the time to implement guard rails is now.