Responsibility Gap
A responsibility gap arises when a BCI-mediated action causes harm but it is unclear who is answerable — the user, the clinician, the decoder's developers, or the device manufacturer. Because a decoder can misclassify intention, and because control is often shared between user and machine, the usual link between a person's intention and their action is loosened, complicating both moral and legal responsibility.
The 'problem of many hands' compounds this: outcomes emerge from a pipeline of contributors (hardware, training data, model, clinical setup, user) so no single party fully controls the result. Proposed responses include clear allocation of duties by role, logging and auditability so decisions can be reconstructed, meaningful human control and veto, and adapting product-liability and clinical-negligence doctrines to autonomous, adaptive decoders.
If an assistive robotic arm driven by a shared-control decoder knocks over an object, was it the user's command, the autonomy layer's path planning, or a decoder error? Without logging and a clear responsibility model, the question may be unanswerable after the fact.
Without logging and an explicit responsibility model, after-the-fact attribution may be impossible.