In 2021, 193 Member States at UNESCO’s General Conference adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as the first important step towards a future global standard-setting instrument on the subject. The text reflects an emerging consensus among the international community about the growing ethical concerns with artificial intelligence (AI). Among these concerns are also serious risks and dangers attributed to the manipulative effects of AI, which can be further exacerbated by the creative combination of AI with other innovative (...) technologies or applications, such as brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), robotics, and big data. The risks for individuals and society as a whole caused by manipulation through AI are already well known and have recently also been addressed by the European Union having released a proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Among multiple risks related to AI, the AIA singles out the specific dangers related to AI systems that deploy “subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness to materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm”. The present article thus aims to highlight the known and potential dangers related to AI systems manipulating human thoughts and behaviour through subliminal and supraliminal means and methods. To this end, it advocates the joint study of law and the senses captured by the concept of legal synaesthesia to correspond to the need for an interdisciplinary debate covering the complexity of the links between AI, related technologies, human perception based on the senses and the mind, as well as the role and instruments of law in the future organization of societies in this world. (shrink)

Neural plasticity has been invoked as a powerful argument against nativism. However, there is a line of argument, which is well exemplified by Pinker and more recently by Laurence and Margolis The conceptual mind: new directions in the study of concepts, MIT, Cambridge, 2015) with respect to concept nativism, according to which even extreme cases of plasticity show important innate constraints, so that one should rather speak of “constrained plasticity”. According to this view, cortical areas are not really equipotential, they (...) perform instead different kinds of computation, follow essentially different learning rules, or have a fixed internal structure acting as a filter for specific categories of inputs. We intend to analyze this argument, in the light of a review of current neuroscientific literature on plasticity. Our conclusion is that Laurence and Margolis are right in their appeal to innate constraints on connectivity—a thesis that is nowadays welcome to both nativists and non-nativists —but there is little support for their claim of further innate differentiation between and within cortical areas. As we will show, there is instead strong evidence that the cortex is characterized by the indefinite repetition of substantially identical computational units, giving rise in any of its portions to Hebbian, input-dependent plasticity. Although this is entirely compatible with the existence of innate constraints on the brain’s connectivity, the cerebral cortex architecture based on a multiplicity of maps correlating with one another has important computational consequences, a point that has been underestimated by traditional connectionist approaches. (shrink)