post#5-round table discussion

The topic we discuss in tutorial was whether the governments or organizations should regulate the technology of brain study utilizing with computaional modeling.

In recent years, as the development of computer technologies, there were more and more new born things came to our life, such as Internet-banking, online games, interactive media and so on. Brain study utilized computational modeling is one of them, which helps us making a much clearer understanding of how human’s brain processes information.

The phrase “brain study” seems like the mind reader mentioned in folklore and science fiction. It sounds incredible, but now the scientists are very close to achieve this concept. The term brain study utilized computational modeling refers to use extensive computaional resources to study the behavior of human brain by computer simulation. It probably makes a great improvement on current medical technology. With the help of brain study, we can know the reason such as why people got mental diseases and how heroin controls drug taker’s mind, after knowing the reasons we can take corresponding actions to solve the problems. Such a helpful technology, the supporting team think governments should not regulate it. However, our team having an opposite view and I think governments should regulate this technology.

Why do they think brain study should not be regulated? They think for computational modeling, it requires gathering a huge amount of related information in order to do computer simulation. If governments regulate it, the researchers would not have the freedom to gather sufficient information as they wanted. However, I think it is to be emphasized is that freedom does not mean no rules, another way saying is that rules do not refer to no freedom. For giving the right direction of development of this technology, government should regulate it, just like creating a road for vehicles driving with safety. The regulation likes the road, proper road planning leads more vehicles driving on it. Meanwhile, under the rules, the researchers can carry on the research more freedom without people’s doubts.

They also think that there are no adverse effects of brain study, so governments do not need put time on making regulation. If we think carefully about brain study, there is negative side of this technology. For instance, some people would use this technology to illegally obtain and propagate personal information, people would live without privacy.

In my polytechnic final year project, I did a research on neural network. I think it can be considered as a kind of brain study. Neural networks are models of the brain and have been used within Artificial Intelligence to provide alternative explanations to the symbolic explanations of cognition in which one assumes that an intelligent system has certain explicit representations of some aspect of the world and uses these in intelligent behavior [1]. For our project, the neural network was used to recognized car’s number plates; it also can be implemented with many other purposes, if it is highly developed, it would very close to human’s brain, so there is a potential adverse effect. An example, such as the robot in some science fiction movies, the robot may attack humans and destroy the civilization, although it was only showed on movies, none of us can assure these will not happens in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to make regulation on using those technologies for eliminating the potential danger. A proposed rule like the robot’s programmer must write a high priority command “cannot attack human” when they program a robot.

At the end of discuss, the oppsite team changed their view, and agreed with our view. In conclusion, nothing can be accomplished without norms. Therefore the governments should regulate the technology of computational modeling on brain study, it is necessary for the health development of this technology.