Posted by Zack Lynch

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have joined forces to publish "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women" which was released earlier this month. I just ordered my copy. Here is their reasoning why.

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution."

I couldn't agree more.

Posted by Zack Lynch

A few weeks ago I participated in a day long discussion at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto around the topic of When Everything is Programmable. Lots of very interesting scenarios and viewpoints were shared. For my part, I stuck to the theme of our emerging neurosociety. Towards the end of the day each of us were asked to write up a 10 year scenario focused on our area of expertise. Jake Dunagan, IFTF's Director of Technology Horizons Program and fellow neurofuturist joined me in sketching out this scenario which touches on a whole set of emerging issues. This is not meant to be comprehensive, more so a quick sketch we put together in 45 minutes.

September 13, 2019 President Signs NINA (Neuro Information Nondiscrimination Act)

Inspired by the GINA (Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act) legislation passed in 2008, NINA might include areas such as:

-Explicit right to cognitive liberty, brain privacy
-Bans discrimination in hiring based on neuroimaging profile
-Bans all local, state 'drug vaccine' programs
-Bans 'neuroprofiling' for travel and attendance at public events
-Subsidizes accelerated learning with neuroenablement technologies
-Legalizes use of neuroenablers
-Bans denial of health coverage based on neuroprofile
-Bans cosmetic memory erasure

The scenario is being accelerated by the development of more sophisticated imaging technologies, neuroinformatic analysis algorithms, neurofeedback technologies, research into neuroplasticity, drug vaccine, neuropharma and neurodevice R&D.

The reason this scenario was seen as important to sketch out was that right now we have a whole host of technologies that are emerging without an effective policy infrastructure. There will be severe unintended consequences as technologies accelerate across a wide variety of enabling disciplines and national governments may eventually need to step in to protect their populations and their basic human rights.

Posted by Zack Lynch

Big brain thinkers are aggregating in Berlin over next few days for the Decade of the Mind V Conference. The three themes are Education (how neuroscience can aid educational research and policy); Social Policy (how neuroeconomics can inform public policy); and Health (neurotech developments for brain related illness).

Posted by Zack Lynch

In Chapter Nine, Perception Shift, we explore the societal implications of a time when people across all walks of life intentionally choose to use neurotechnologies to influence their mood, senses and memories. By subtly influencing one's mental self - improving cognitive clarity, extending physical sensations, expanding emotional well being - we will ultimately begin to change how we perceive daily events. In short, society will experience a perception shift. There are profound ethical, legal and societal issues with moving down this pathway, but it does indeed seem like this is a likely path that many may take as we travel deeper into the emerging neurosociety.

A recent article in the Prospect written by David Edmonds, The Age of Enhancement, highlights the complexities that arise when considering the societal impact of conscious mental enhancement, "At the heart of the debate there remains unease about tampering with the very things that make humans human. And while we are becoming accustomed to some varieties of enhancement, our capacity to manipulate not just our bodies and our cognitive faculties, but potentially also our core emotions, is taking us into a world of dizzyingly new options."

Posted by Zack Lynch

In chapter 4, Finance with Feelings, I talk about the emergence of neurosoftware applications that leverage neuroeconomic research into decision making to improve our understanding of individual economic behavior and the vicissitudes of financial markets. As with each previous revolution, the financial sector adopts the latest innovations to improve capital efficiency. The Neuro Revolution is no different. In response to requests to emails from people looking for more info on software that could help them "understand how their emotions influence their decisions" or "tame their emotions" I'm writing this brief neurofinance post.

Realize that these applications are just beginning to be developed. The more sophisticated work is still being carried out in the research labs of people like Andrew Lo, Dmitry Repin, Xiao-Jing Wang, Paul Zak and others. If you are serious, then I'd highly recommend attending the upcoming Society for Neuroeconomics meeting Sept. 27-29 in Evanston, Illinois to get insights into cutting edge research. Richard Peterson, whose story I describe in detail in the book founded a $50M hedge fund, MarketPsy Capital, that uses special emotion detecting algorithms to help time trades.

Evidence of the evolution of these neurofinancial software applications is everywhere. Sunday's NYTimes carried a story, Mining the Web for Feelings no Facts, that discussed several companies developing "sentiment analysis" systems. Perhaps more interesting was Monday's WSJ article "The Mistakes We Make - and Why We Make Them" which is loaded with basic ideas for neurofinancial applications. In the article, Mr. Statman, a professor at Santa Clara University points out eights ways to avoid the cognitive and emotion errors that lead to poor investing. One clear theme throughout his musings is that "regret" plays a pivotal role many of our worst mistakes. Also, here is a post I wrote in 2003 with some oldies but still undeveloped goodies.

So the bottom line is this: the future isn't here yet, go invent it.