The Question We Should Ask a Regulator Is Not "Is It Safe?"

There is a temptation, whenever a second regulator joins a review of a technology inside our bodies, to demand the binary: safe or not, cleared or recalled. It is the wrong demand. The augmentation sector — the roughly five percent of us now carrying neural links and somatic implants, and the many more who will — does not live in a world of settled verdicts. It lives in the long tail of decades-out effects that no certification can foresee and only patient monitoring can catch. So the better question to put to the authorities now comparing data is not "is it safe?" but "are you still looking?" A regulator who says a device passed every test it was measured against is telling the truth and dodging the point; the point is whether anyone is measuring the tests we did not yet know to run. Vigilance is not the enemy of innovation. It is the only thing that lets a person consent to hardware in their skull and still sleep. We should reward the regulators who keep asking, and distrust the confidence that wants them to stop.