A 3D hologram of a brain displayed by a digital circuit and semiconductor.
Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images
The United Nations is warning about “potentially harmful” advances in neurotechnology.
Some tech could allow AI to compromise a person’s mental privacy, UNESCO officials said.
The UN proposes to establish ethics and regulations of the neurotech industry.
Some thoughts really should be kept to yourself.
The United Nations has raised the alarm about “potentially harmful” advances in neurotechnology, suggesting that brain implants and scans could allow artificial intelligence to infringe on private, human thoughts, according to Agence France-Presse.
“It’s like putting neurotech on steroids,” Mariagrazia Squicciarini, an economist from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, told the AFP.
As artificial intelligence enhances the neurotech field, it will need regulation. The technology has “far-reaching and potentially harmful” capabilities, Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s assistant director general for social and human sciences, told the AFP.
“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,” Ramos said, according to AFP.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the tech is “advancing at warp speed,” AFP reported.
While the technology can be life-altering, it may come at a cost, UN officials suggested. UNESCO spoke to Hannah Galvin, a woman with epilepsy who had a neurotech device installed in her brain to detect seizures and notify patients of when to lie down.
The device ultimately made life worse for Galvin, who said she was having as many as 100 seizures a day, so the device was constantly going off.
“I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn’t me. And I just got more and more depressed. I didn’t like it at all,” Galvin, who eventually had the device removed, told UNESCO.
However, the technology could be “fantastic” for other people, allowing the blind to see or the paralyzed to walk, Squicciarini said, according to AFP.
“Neurotechnology could help solve many health issues, but it could also access and manipulate people’s brains, and produce information about our identities, and our emotions. It could threaten our rights to human dignity, freedom of thought and privacy,” UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay said in June, when she proposed a “common ethical framework at the international level.”