In recent months, Chile took important steps in the formation of a legal ecosystem that regulates the relationship of humans with technological deployment, known colloquially as neuro-rights. Each of these steps involved a debate between those in favor of legislating in that field and those who opposed it for various reasons, one of them the lack of opportunity for discussion in the midst of the most acute social crisis in that country of the last 50 years.

Last October, the Chamber of Senators concluded the procedures that gave the force of law to a constitutional reform that included a paragraph in Article 3 of the Magna Carta, dedicated to neuro-rights, which says: “Scientific and technological development will be at the service of of people and will be carried out with respect for life and physical and mental integrity. The law will regulate the requirements, conditions and restrictions for its use in people, having to protect especially brain activity, as well as the information coming from it ”.

The law indicated in the paragraph has already taken its first steps: on December 7, the Senate approved it unanimously and turned it over to the Chamber of Deputies. This project seeks to prevent brains from being intervened without consent to protect them from advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. "With this, the legal regulation of the protection of people with respect to these scientific and technological advances begins to materialize," said Andrés Couve, Minister of Sciences.

A second bill aims to regulate technology platforms.

Threats. Neuro-rights emerge as a response to technological advance linked to a highly enhanced version of the invasion of privacy: control of the human brain.

This look has its detractors. For Alberto Lecaros, director of the Bioethics and Rights Observatory at the Universidad del Desarrollo, Chileans cannot "regulate in advance without seeing what impact these incipient technologies have." He added that "the important thing is that the law advances in parallel with technological advances." According to Lecaros, “these are technologies that are under development, it constitutes a highly anticipated object of protection to be carried out at the legislative level; there are hurries when the technologies are still incipient, then it constitutes a risk regarding these new rights ”.

In addition, he criticized the fact that the bill was dealt with before that of personal data, which he - he assured - is drafted in the Senate itself and that in order of hierarchy it should be dealt with before neuro-rights because it contains them.

Reasons. Although those who promoted both regulations assure that it is not only about defending against threats, but also about anticipating the positive field that will open when neurotechnology offers proven devices to combat Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases, the installation of neuro-rights is a problem of the present, not of the future. This was the axis of the debate that took place in Spain prior to the exit of the Digital Rights Charter, which, although it will not have immediate legal impact, is the beginning of a journey on an issue in which very few have taken concrete steps.

Bioethicist Marcello Ienca, professor and researcher at the Higher Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, ensures that brain-machine interfaces (ICM), beyond the degree of physical invasion of the brain, already have the ability to interfere with the mind and , therefore, alter identity and behavior. “The ethical challenge posed by ICM and other neurotechnologies forces us to address a fundamental ethical-socio-legal and political question: determining whether –or under what conditions– it is legitimate to access or interfere with a person's brain activity. This question invites debate at the various levels of governance ”. And he warns: the capacity for damage that can be executed through social platforms is linked to the fact that in the beginning there was no supervision. By the time it was tried, it was too late. "When it comes to neurotechnology, we cannot take this risk," he stresses.

Both the bill and the Chilean constitutional reform are part of an agenda that began to be promoted in 2019 thanks to the ideas of the Morningside Group, an American group of academics that has been warning governments for years about the need to protect mental integrity . Precisely, the animator of this group, the Spanish Rafael Yuste, a professor at Columbia University, USA, was one of the signatories of a document published in April 2021 in which the central aspects of the debate on the neurotechnologies: it is pointed out, in the first place, that they have the potential to significantly alter elements of the human experience, for which it raises the need to offer information to the population and, as part of a campaign, an open debate between officials, academics, technologists, companies and other civil society organizations.

Second, "neurotechnology also offers unique access to some of the most intimate data we have to offer: brain data," says the document entitled "Recommendations for the responsible development and application of neurotechnologies." Here, the personal consent model that technology companies adopt to appropriate the private data of the users of apps and operating systems, are shown to be ineffective due to their limited scope.

They also raise the need for “laundering” of motivations in research, development and application of ICM devices, a bias that “should be exposed, recognized and mitigated whenever possible”.

Fourth, the group claims that any neurotechnology must be thoroughly analyzed and tested before its application in humans, "always from the perspective of security and distributive justice in the short and long term".