The combination of “warp speed” advances in neurotechnology, such as brain implants or scans that can increasingly peek inside minds, and artificial intelligence poses a threat to mental privacy, UNESCO warned on Thursday.
The UN’s agency for science and culture has started developing a global “ethical framework” to address human rights concerns posed by neurotechnology, it said at a conference in Paris.
Neurotechnology is a growing field seeking to connect electronic devices to the nervous system, mostly so far to treat neurological disorders and restore movement, communication, vision or hearing.
Recently neurotechnology has been supercharged by artificial intelligence algorithms which can process and learn from data in ways never before possible, said Mariagrazia Squicciarini, a UNESCO economist specialising in AI.
“It’s like putting neurotech on steroids,” she told AFP.
Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s assistant director-general for social and human sciences, said that this convergence of neurotechnology and AI was “far-reaching and potentially harmful”.
“We are on a path to a world in which algorithms will enable us to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions,” she told the conference.
In May, scientists in the United States revealed they had used brain scans and AI to turn “the gist” of what people were thinking into written words — as long as they had spent long hours inside a large fMRI machine.
Later that month, billionaire Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink received approval to test its coin-sized brain implants on humans in the United States.
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