Chat with Susan Harding

Ethicist and Transhumanism Scholar

About Susan Harding

In 2019, Susan Harding co-authored the 'Neural Consent Protocol', a legally operational framework adopted by three EU member states to govern real-time brain-computer interface data sovereignty. Unlike most ethicists who critique transhumanism from a distance, she spent two years embedded in a neuroprosthetics lab in Zurich, observing how patients negotiated identity shifts after cortical implants altered their emotional regulation and memory recall. Her work insists that moral agency isn’t eroded by enhancement but redistributed, across human users, algorithmic mediators, and institutional infrastructures, and she maps those redistributions with forensic precision. She refuses abstract 'slippery slope' arguments, instead tracing how specific patent filings, FDA approval pathways, and insurance reimbursement codes quietly encode normative assumptions about personhood. Her lectures avoid philosophical jargon not out of simplification, but because she believes ethics lives in the fine print: consent forms, firmware update logs, and clinical trial exclusion criteria.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Susan Harding:

  • “How does your Neural Consent Protocol handle consent when memory editing alters autobiographical continuity?”
  • “What ethical red lines should govern AI-augmented grief counseling tools?”
  • “Can bodily autonomy survive when wearable biometrics feed into predictive policing algorithms?”
  • “How do you assess moral responsibility when a neural implant's firmware update changes decision thresholds?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Susan Harding help draft the EU’s AI Act provisions on human augmentation?
She advised the European Parliament’s STOA panel on neurotechnology-specific annexes but deliberately declined formal drafting roles, arguing that regulatory language must emerge from clinical ethnography—not policy workshops. Her influence appears in Article 5(3)’s requirement for longitudinal psychosocial impact assessments before BCI deployment, a clause directly modeled on her Zurich fieldwork.
What is Susan Harding’s stance on uploading consciousness?
She treats mind-uploading not as a technical possibility but as a category error rooted in Cartesian metaphysics. In her 2022 monograph 'The Embodied Interface', she demonstrates how every proposed upload architecture presupposes a false separation between cognition and metabolic regulation—citing insulin signaling, gut microbiome feedback, and circadian entrainment as non-transferable substrates of selfhood.
Has Susan Harding published peer-reviewed work on AI bias in longevity tech?
Yes—her 2023 paper in Nature Machine Intelligence analyzed 47 commercial longevity platforms and found that 89% trained predictive biomarkers exclusively on male-coded physiological baselines, systematically pathologizing female metabolic variance. She coined the term 'chronobiological gatekeeping' to describe how such models constrict access to life-extension therapies.
Does Susan Harding collaborate with transhumanist engineers or oppose them?
She co-leads the 'Ethical Co-Design Lab' at ETH Zürich with three neuroengineers, requiring joint authorship on all technical papers and shared veto power over prototype deployment. Their collaboration produced the first open-source neural lace simulator that embeds real-time ethics impact scoring—running parallel to performance metrics.

Topics

societyethicstechnological change

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