The World Needs Standards for Neurotechnology

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21-04-2025

Neuroscience and its applications in neurotechnology, including techno-human interfaces linking human brains to computers, machines and even other human brains, have risen to the forefront of contemporary scientific research, amid great expectations of both social and economic progress, and transformative potential regarding humankind's self-image. Because of its ability to influence many other fields, neurotechnology is expected to drive radical societal change.
At the same time, neurotechnology's potential impacts—including on basic concepts of what is human—has led to calls and some proposals for common ethical ground rules for neurotechnology research and applications. Among the various organizations calling for and proposing ethical ground rules are the world's educational, scientific and cultural organization, UNESCO, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the OECD, the World Economic Forum and a variety of think-tanks and independent organizations such as the Geneva Academy, the Neurorights Foundation, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the IoNx Neuroethics Lab.
Despite these calls and proposals, however, there are currently no binding rules on neurotechnology research and applications. Given the speed with which advances in the field are being made, there is an urgent need to fill that gap with standards that balance neurotechnology's potential social and economic benefits with the implications of its panhuman potentialities for humankind.
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Neuroscience and its applications as neurotechnology are among the most important branches of contemporary scientific research. Its fields of inquiry include human beings' fundamental capacity to understand and create worlds, as well as the self-understanding of this capacity. But it also speaks to the riddle of consciousness and self-consciousness itself, including the conceptual mental capacities of self-reflection on which every reality and understanding depends.
As such, contemporary neuroscientific research is producing, and with increasing pace, some of the most innovative insights into the human being—and being human—in history. This offers huge potential for economic and social returns in many fields, from medicine and the health care sector to automatization and even the extension of human physical and mental capacities.
However, there is currently no consensus on how and where to deploy applications of new options or on the desired results in doing so. To the contrary, there is an ongoing competition among different economic and social sectors on the best applications of neurotechnology for social progress, and some interpretations of desirable outcomes lack a globally conceived background and philosophical depth.
Applications of neurotechnology such as Brain-Computer-Interfaces, or BCIs, Brain-Machine Interfaces, or BMIs, and—since 2021—Brain-Brain-Interfaces, or BBIs, are at the forefront of the expanding business of connecting human bodies and minds with machines, computers and more recently artificial intelligence. These developments have potent inter- and trans-disciplinary, philosophical and—even more importantly—humanist implications. Some entrepreneurs and corporations, such as Elon Musk with Neuralink, propose to use standard routine implants in the human brain to enable it to communicate with intelligent machines and other human brains through the Internet of Things, or IoT. Some innovators in the field are even convinced that humans must become cyborgs in order to stay relevant in the age of AI and chatbots, though that perspective is contested and in any case requires thorough ethical scrutinity.
In the long term, some experts foresee a mixed techno-human form of 'living intelligence' that could merge AI and sensors—along with the myriad information they gather—with bio- and neurotechnology. The result would be a world in which AI meets organic intelligence. In such a world, humans would be merging with increasingly self-learning devices to break through known boundaries of learning, reasoning and understanding.
Some even conceive of this potential stage of development as the future of 'generative pedagogy,' with the potential to transform the educational sector and the very idea of learning as well as the rules and habits of public debate and its underlying concepts of rationality and ethics. The danger, according to Amy Webb, is that in focusing solely on AI without paying attention to its intersections with other technologies, we 'risk missing a wave of disruption already forming.'
In light of these potential breakthroughs, businesses will be under growing pressure to commercially exploit these new 'generative' and 'living' bio-neuro-techno interfaces. And as those interfaces emerge, the importance of neuroscience and neurotechnology as a focus of global investment is destined to increase.
That makes examining the social and ethical dimensions of neurotechnologies even more urgent.
Given the increasing amount of global investment in neurotechnologies and the speed of recent breakthroughs—such as the completion of both the European Union's Human Brain Project in March 2023 and the first mapping of human brain cells in the same year—many global multilateral and civil society organizations are calling for the adoption of common ethical standards for the field, both private and public.
Among those seeking to shepherd the emerging discussions is the United Nation's educational, scientific and cultural organization UNESCO. In 2022, UNESCO issued a report on ethical issues of neurotechnology and followed that up in 2023 with a report on the risks and challenges of neurotechnologies for human rights as well as another on the scientific advancements and major trends shaping the neurotechnology landscape. These reports followed up on an earlier version of the report on ethical issues from 2021 that was extended in a 2022 edition.
UNESCO also led the way toward basic joint scientific-ethical regulation with its first International Conference on the Ethics of Neurotechnology, held in July 2023 at its Paris headquarters. The conference's joint declaration pointed toward 'the need for a comprehensive governance framework to harness the potential of neurotechnology and address the risks it presents to societies.'
In the spring of 2024, UNESCO also appointed its first international expert group to prepare a basic draft of global standards for a transnational ethics of neurotechnology and its expanding range of practical applications. The group met twice the same year, in April and August 2024.
To further advance the ethical debate, UNESCO has also founded its own research and education clearinghouse on the 'Ethics of Neurotechnology,' where it collects information about the latest developments across the world, prepares fact-based ethical debates and convenes philosophers, artists and decision-makers to find the best viable paths forward. To this end, in 2025, the organization also founded a number of specialized UNESCO Chairs on neurobioethics within the global network of around 1,000 UNESCO Chairs, of which the author of this article holds one.
These activities have been accompanied by public debates and open explorative efforts, including one in an innovative 'story' format recounting the personal experiences of people working in the field. And in April 2023, the organization published a report by UNESCO's executive board laying out a set of quality standards to be implemented by future work on the topic. The report says that an ethical regulatory framework is needed to 'address the governance gaps that can lead to a deliberate or inadvertent negative impact of neurotechnology on individuals and societies' and should be aimed at 'harnessing the benefits of neurotechnology and ensuring equitable access to them across and within countries, while mitigating the associated risks to human rights and freedoms.' In addition, such a framework could 'raise public awareness of the impact of neurotechnology on current and future generations' and highlight 'the role of ethics in ensuring a beneficial trajectory of the technology,' the report states.
Nevertheless, there is until today no broadly accepted consensus about red-line limits on research and applications beyond the general concerns discussed in this report.
Together these reports, committees, activities and debates point toward an increased attention and care, particularly toward the socio-political, cultural and educational implications of the rapid progress in the field of neurotechnologies. The heightened awareness regarding the interwoven risks and opportunities the sector presents is valid not only for the activities of UNESCO but also of national governments, international bodies and private enterprises, such as the OECD, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and a variety of highly specialized private think tanks, such as The Foresight Institute.
All of them are in the process of creating their own 'debate maps' composed of databases and archives of pros and cons in order to foster informed and, in most cases, broadly accessible discussions. Some examples include the OECD's Neurotechnology Toolkit for Policymakers and its recommendations on neurotechnology governance, the EU's Human Brain Project and an increasing array of region-specific work.
Crucially connected to these discussions is the core topic of creativity, given the neuro-behavioral sciences' position at the forefront of new and often surprising discoveries. As the progress of this field is interrelated with neurocomputing and the vibrant interface of quantum computing and AI in the broad sense, it will drive the investigation of creativity further.
As a result, over the coming years, creativity will increasingly occur at the crossroads between the human condition and technology, for instance between human- and AI-generated content. As such applications become more accessible and more widely adopted, this lively intersection will emanate in capillary ways into most sectors of the social fabric, with a vast variety of consequences. The growing interconnection—and partial convergence—of innovations at the interface of neuroresearch, AI and generativity may widely transform what is considered 'creation,' as well as our understanding of creativity traditionally tied to human innovation and the arts.
Now branded cautiously as 'generativity,' this creative aspect of technology is steadily being transferred into the fields of 'intelligent' technology and their evolving relations to techno-neurology. Given these trends, one of the most important tasks with regard to ethical regulation of neurotechnology is to ensure that the fundamental capacity of human creativity—which profoundly interrelates with the practical understanding and future of countless social fields—remains human and wherever possible humanist.
To this end, creativity must be distinguished from mere generativity. And productivity must be related, in innovative ways, to the topics of anticipation and inspiration, which are tied to questions of the 'emerging'—that is, the coming-into-existence of the as yet non-existent, which is the essence of anything that is new.
Against this backdrop, the UNESCO ethics initiative on neurotechnology appears to be even more important in the long run. Given the nature of the challenge, this initiative must interconnect biology, the techno-sciences, anthropology and the humanities, while exploring the intersections of creativity and futures from a pan-humanist standpoint.
In a best-case scenario, this could provide the neurosciences a more globally shared ethical background and orientation leading step by step to a pragmatic regulatory framework. In so doing, it could also enhance UNESCO's work on Futures Literacy by providing new insights into how human rationality and anticipatory behavior works. In these ways, it could enrich the contemporary debate on how to get to a more productive relationship between contemporary understandings of 're-globalization,' which is often reduced to transition when used in the fields of economics and politics, but rsuggests transformation when used in the fields of culture and the social sciences. Last but not least, in the framework of UNESCO's neuroethics initiative, the study of creativity could—and should—be better contextualized to specific habitats and environments at the global-local interface, in order to generate novel initiatives at the 'glocal' level.
Working toward a new framework for neuroethics would be not only timely but also consistent with UNESCO's efforts to humanize new technologies, as illustrated by its articulation of the world's first joint 'Recommendations on the Ethics of AI.' Further cooperation may lead to transnational initiatives in research, education, dissemination and public enlightenment, as well as public-private capacity-building and intergenerational futures dialogue in the field.
Overall, neuroscience and its applications as neurotechnology, including processes of human-technology convergence and advancements of inter- and transdisciplinary insights into the human body and mind, have become issues of undisputed socio-cultural importance. More than that, the nexus of neuroscience, neuroculture and neuroethics is positioning itself at the center of the contemporary trend in academic research toward inter- and transdisciplinary work. And it is increasingly influencing futures philosophy and futures research, including transnational approaches launched by UNESCO such as Anticipatory Innovation Governance and Futures Literacy.
As UNESCO pointed out in its basic reflections on the emerging transcultural ethics of the field, 'unlike many other frontier technologies, neurotechnology can directly access, manipulate and emulate the structure of the brain, and with it produce information about our identities, our emotions, our fears. Combined with artificial intelligence, its resulting potential can easily become a threat to notions of human identity, human dignity, freedom of thought, autonomy, (mental) privacy and well-being.'
To address these issues and further the positive effects of the sector will become as much a necessity for scientific scrutiny, as it will be an unavoidable policy challenge for all societies around the world over the coming years.
Summing up, the question remains, What impacts on present and future social and economic developments can we anticipate from the current advances in neurotechnology?
While many facets of the answer remain open, one thing is clear: Neurotechnology's impact over the coming decades will be profound and multidimensional. The expected advances have the potential to reshape a variety of sectors, including health care, education and labor. In health care, the improved treatment of mental health conditions and neurological disorders, the rise of personalized medicine and the potential for early diagnosis through brain monitoring may open up new frontiers for progress in the daily life-quality of millions around the globe. In education, tailored learning experiences, lifelong learning, technology-sustained training of the brain and the enhancement of cognitive functions through non-invasive brain stimulation techniques promise progress in literacy and cognitive maturity. In the field of labor, augmented reality and new markets for brain technologies could lead to greater productivity and growth.
Nevertheless, these advances may also come with other positive, negative and as yet undetermined effects, which calls for vigilance. For instance, they could alter human self-image in unprecedented ways and must therefore be carefully embedded in wider-reaching humanist and socio-philosophical considerations. Similarly, military applications—such as cognitive warfare and BCI-operated weapons systems—as well as the use of the brain as technological interface against the backdrop of rising inequality in the access to advanced technologies present new economic and social challenges.
Above all, they will usher in a new era in human reasoning and the history of ideas. As such, they must therefore be addressed using new forms of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches that still need to be more firmly embedded in the contemporary academic fabric.
Neurotechnology will likely lead to a profound transformation in society. While it has the potential to improve health outcomes, enhance cognitive abilities and create new opportunities for productivity and innovation, it also raises complex ethical, social and economic questions. The ethical regulation of these technologies will need careful consideration to ensure that they benefit all members of society and are not used in ways that exacerbate inequality or harm individual rights.
Roland Benedikter is UNESCO Chair in Interdisciplinary Anticipation and Global-Local Transformation, co-head of the Center for Advanced Studies of the Eurac Research think tank in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, ordinary member of the Italian Network of UNESCO Chairs Rete delle Cattedre UNESCO Italiane (ReCUI) and ordinary member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the author and editor of 30 books and more than 300 specialized publications, including the 2023 open access book, 'Globalization: Past, Present, Future' (University of California Press 2023) and, most recently, the book, 'Neuroscience, Neuroculture, and Neuroethics: A Broad Overview' (Springer 2024).
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