Blog of Marie-Christine Gries, SI UN Representative at UNESCO. 

Do we need a normative instrument for the ethics of neurotechnologies? 

This is not a science-fiction novel, but rather the imminent emergence of new and serious questions of individual and collective ethical awareness and human rights.  

Neurotechnologies are making rapid progress, and we can rightly expect them to make a major contribution to improving well-being and quality of life. One in 8 people in the world lives with a mental or neurological disorder; the frequency of degenerative mental illnesses affecting the elderly is rising because of longer life expectancy and the ageing of the world’s population. The global social and financial cost of these illnesses is considerable.  

In the economic landscape, the sector’s rapid growth is not insignificant: annual private investment in the companies concerned has multiplied by 22 in the last ten years, and the number of patents by 20. The concentration of the sector in the hands of the five largest players, who have produced 80% of the advances made, may bring a risk of accessibility problems.  

Neurotechnologies are advancing in synergy with Artificial Intelligence, which is stimulating even more, promising developments and raising additional questions about the use of algorithms. 

Ethical Considerations for the use of Neurotechnologies.

 

Touching the human brain with such powerful technology raises fundamental, unprecedented questions. Specific questions have been identified by UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee, which worked for two years on this subject and published its report at the end of 2021. A UNESCO international conference on the ethics of neurotechnologies in July 2023 also reached conclusions favourable to the development of a normative instrument. 

• Psychic manipulation already existed, but accessing and modifying an individual’s neuronal system, and irreversibly altering their memory, directly calls into question their mental and psychic integrity, and thus their human dignity. 

 

• Neurotechnologies open up the possibility of manipulating or altering cognitive functions, with the consequent risk of damaging individuals’ decision-making faculties, and hence their autonomy. Personal identity is directly threatened.

 

• The development of these technologies makes it possible to treat patients with sensory, cognitive or motor disorders by improving their faculties. However, they may also inspire applications for people seeking to enhance their normal abilities. 

 

• Unregulated neurotechnologies already exist and are sold directly to the consumer.

 

• During the period of brain development and childhood, the use of neurotechnological applications (neurodevices and brain-computer interfaces in paediatrics, but also in a non-medical field, play), presents risks of uncontrollable personality modifications, given the great difficulty to distinguish behaviours induced by the neurodevice from those resulting from the natural development of the child’s brain.

 

• Finally, neurotechnologies have the capacity to transmit digital data relating to the brain activity of individual users, which infringes their privacy as this generated neuronal data is mostly unconscious and therefore not controlled by the person concerned. The device used may deliver information without consent, which would be exploited for harmful, discriminatory purposes, or delivered to the consumer market (neuromarketing). Criminal piracy of the data from the device used is obviously to be feared.  

 

• From a societal point of view, it’s easy to imagine what poorly controlled and inequitably accessible neurotechnologies could lead to.

 

Conclusion

The General Conference has mandated UNESCO to present a recommendation on the ethics of neurotechnologies, a standard-setting instrument to be submitted to Member States at its 43rd session in 2025.  

For Human rights, the ethical control of the use of neurotechnologies is a major challenge for the years to come.