- The United Nations warns of “potentially harmful” advances in neurotechnology.
- Some technologies could allow AI to compromise a person’s privacy, UNESCO officials have said.
- The UN proposes to establish ethics and regulation of the neurotechnology industry.
Some thoughts really need to be kept to yourself.
The United Nations has sounded the alarm over ‘potentially harmful’ advances in neurotechnology, suggesting that brain implants and scanners could allow artificial intelligence to intrude on private human thoughts, according to Agence France -Press.
“It’s like putting neurotech on steroids,” Mariagrazia Squicciarini, an economist at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, told AFP.
As artificial intelligence improves the field of neurotechnology, it will need regulation. The technology has “far-reaching and potentially dangerous” capabilities, Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s deputy director-general for social and human sciences, told AFP.
“We are on the way to a world in which algorithms will allow us to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms that underlie their intentions, emotions and decisions,” Ramos said, according to the report. AFP.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the technology is “advancing at lightning speed”, AFP reported.
Although the technology can be life-changing, it can come at a cost, UN officials have suggested. UNESCO spoke to Hannah Galvin, a woman with epilepsy who had a neurotechnology device installed in her brain to detect seizures and tell patients when to lie down.
The device ultimately worsened the life of Galvin, who said she had up to 100 seizures a day, so the device constantly turned off.
“I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn’t me. And I was getting more and more depressed. I didn’t like it at all,” Galvin said , who eventually had the device removed, to 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 problems, but it could also access and manipulate people’s brains, and produce information about our identities and emotions. This could threaten our rights to human dignity, freedom of thought and privacy,” said the Director-General of UNESCO. said Audrey Azoulay in June, when she proposed a “common ethical framework at the international level”.