From Scanning Brains to Reading Minds: Talking to Engineers about Brain-Computer Interface

Abstract

We presented software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area with a working brain-computer interface (BCI) to surface the narratives and anxieties around these devices among technical practitioners. Despite this group's heterogeneous beliefs about the exact nature of the mind, we find a shared belief that the contents of the mind will someday be "read' or "decoded' by machines. Our findings help illuminate BCI's imagined futures among engineers. We highlight opportunities for researchers to involve themselves preemptively in this nascent space of intimate biosensing devices, suggesting our findings' relevance to long-term futures of privacy and cybersecurity.