Military Neuroenhancement and Risk Assessment - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 241

hand, it would be difficult to arrive at practical guidance for future action. So let
us examine the concept more closely: The risks we address herein are primarily
related to harmful but unintended behavior that may arise from human enhancement
in the military. We will describe a fuller range of other risks and issues involving
intentional harm in the course of the conduct of war later. Also, while much of
the literature's discussion of risk deals predominantly with harms to the individual
warfighter (e.g., Lin et al. 2008; Wang 2011), we expand their range here to include
possible harms to others.
Following the discussion in Lin et al. (2008), let us first define risk simply in terms
of its opposite: safety. Risk is the probability of harm; and safety is the degree of free-
dom from risk. Safety in practice is merely relative, not absolute, freedom from harm,
because no activity is ever completely risk-free. For instance, even a training run
raises the risk of heat stroke or heart attack; taking aspirin raises the risk of blood not
clotting properly or stomach bleeding, even if it lowers the risk of heart attack. Many
risks are uncontroversially worth taking, but how can we determine that?
It may help to recognize that risk can be understood in at least four distinct ways.
Following on the work of Sven Ove Hansson (2004) and Fritz Allhoff (2009), we can
first understand a “risk” as a chance of some unwanted event, or lack of a wanted
event, which one is uncertain will occur. If instead an enhancement definitely had
some specific impact, such as causing all such patients to die within a year, then it
would be more appropriate to term it a “consequence” of that enhancement, rather
than a risk: uncertainty is one of the features of risk.
Second, we can understand a risk as the cause of an uncertain but unwelcome
event or of the possible nonoccurrence of a desired event. A human enhancement
may cause an inability to sleep, or sexual dysfunction, or decreased inhibitions and
resultant inappropriate behavior, or other side effects in a way not perfectly predict-
able. We sometimes call such statistical causal claims a “risk” of such side effects.
The third conception holds that risk is the numerical probability of an unwanted
event or lack of a wanted event, expressible as a percentage outcome. Imagine that we
ask about the risk of an enhancement to have a certain health impact. For example,
how likely is it that taking a particular antisleep medication, which enhances alertness,
will result in paranoia or seizures? The appropriate answer is stated as a probability,
for example, that the risk is 20% according to clinical studies.
Fourth, risk can be understood as a measure of the expected outcome of unwanted,
or lack of wanted, events; this is best understood for groups of events, rather than
for a single instance. So, imagine that there are 1000 soldiers who will be given
a new mind-altering biotechnology designed to increase their ability to process
information and decrease their response time during stressful situations, such as
battle. Further, imagine that some of the soldiers will have adverse reactions to the
neuroenhancements and be paralyzed as a result. We do not know which soldiers
will be paralyzed, but given previous studies or clinical trials, we estimate a rate of 15%.
The risk, then, is 150 out of the 1000 soldiers, in the sense that we expect that number
of soldiers to become paralyzed due to the biotechnological intervention.
These last two ways of understanding risk are more quantitative, as opposed to
qualitative. The third sense of risk gives us the likelihood that something will hap-
pen, usually expressed as a percentage; whereas the fourth sense gives us an expected