Premature Neural Translation: Translation Legitimacy and the Independence Condition Before Autonomy in AI-Driven Brain-Computer Interfaces

AI-driven brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), including closed-loop and affective systems, are usually evaluated through restored function, decoding accuracy, user control, mental privacy, autonomy, agency, responsibility, and identity. These concerns are indispensable but begin too late if the decisive ethical event occurs before a neural, bodily, affective, attentional, or motor disturbance becomes available as the subject’s own. This paper identifies that lower-level problem as premature neural translation: the conversion of disturbance into signal, state, intention, command, risk, or candidate output before subjective recovery has occurred. The central difficulty is not only error but premature correctness — an AI-driven BCI may accurately stabilize what had not yet become the subject’s own object. The paper develops translation legitimacy and an independence condition before autonomy: independence, a lower-bound condition for cognitive sovereignty, concerns the structural permission through which choices, states, utterances, and actions can form, remain unformed, or return otherwise. It further identifies an in-process blind closure zone, where both self-report and system-side verification may arrive downstream of the translation they would assess, and concludes with procedural safeguards for de-objectifying contact and relational and care-ethical implications for human flourishing under AI-driven neurotechnology.