While I would have loved to visit Montreal, but a 10h flight for a 5-minute talk seems hardly justifiable nowadays. I regret to say that I would have done that 10 years ago, when I should have known the impact but hadn’t realized it.

Nevertheless, if interested in the ethics of neuroscience, Montreal and virtual Montreal currently is the place to be. The conference of the International Neuroethics Society is (nearly) fully virtual. It mixes zoom and gather, a great combination as we found out in our last year’s local meeting – lovingly called a retreat but actually a several hundred-person neuroscience conference with keynote, panels, parallel tutorial etc. While there were some initial hickups in the tech, its hopefully going to run well over the remainder of the conference.

I managed to upload my own contribution in time, talking about Harmful scaffolds and deep integration – When cognitive support tools become impediments. This at first hand looks to be a highly theoretic approach. However, it has some straightforward implications for the design of cognitive tools in care, therapy and beyond. The talk is too short to go into these details, but I’ll provide such details in an upcoming article in the next edited volume: NeuroProstEthics. Hope this will be out early next year.