'Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.' 'Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.' Investors' 'dumb transhumanist ideas' setting back neurotech progress, say experts I t has been an excellent year for neurotech, if you ignore the people funding it. In August, a tiny brain implant successfully decoded the inner speech of paralysis patients. In October, an eye restored sight to patients who had lost their vision. It would just be better, say experts, if the most famous investors in the space - tech magnates such as Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman - were less interested in uploading their brains to computers or merging with AI. "It's distorting the debate a lot," said Marcello Ienca, a professor of neuroethics at the Technical University of Munich.

The Unesco standards define a new category of data, 'neural data', and suggest guidelines governing its protection. The Unesco standards define a new category of data, 'neural data', and suggest guidelines governing its protection. Unesco adopts global standards on'wild west' field of neurotechnology UN body's recommendations driven by AI advances and proliferation of consumer-oriented neurotech devices It is the latest move in a growing international effort to put guardrails around a burgeoning frontier - technologies that harness data from the brain and nervous system. Unesco has adopted a set of global standards on the ethics of neurotechnology, a field that has been described as "a bit of a wild west". "There is no control," said Unesco's chief of bioethics, Dafna Feinholz.

Brain foundation models represent a new frontier in AI: instead of processing text or images, these models interpret real-time neural signals from EEG, fMRI, and other neurotechnologies. When integrated with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), they may enable transformative applications-from thought controlled devices to neuroprosthetics-by interpreting and acting on brain activity in milliseconds. However, these same systems pose unprecedented risks, including the exploitation of subconscious neural signals and the erosion of cognitive liberty. Users cannot easily observe or control how their brain signals are interpreted, creating power asymmetries that are vulnerable to manipulation. This paper proposes embedding fiduciary duties-loyalty, care, and confidentiality-directly into BCI-integrated brain foundation models through technical design. Drawing on legal traditions and recent advancements in AI alignment techniques, we outline implementable architectural and governance mechanisms to ensure these systems act in users' best interests. Placing brain foundation models on a fiduciary footing is essential to realizing their potential without compromising self-determination.

A United Nations panel has warned that brain chip technology being pioneered by Elon Musk could be abused for'neurosurveillance' violating'mental privacy,' or'even to implement forms of forced re-education,' threatening human rights worldwide. The UN's agency for science and culture (UNESCO) said neurotechnology like Musk's Neuralink, if left unregulated, will lead to'new possibilities of monitoring and manipulating the human mind through neuroimaging' and'personality-altering' tech. UNESCO is now strategizing on a worldwide'ethical framework' to protect humanity from the potential abuses of the technology -- which they fear will be accelerated by advances in AI. 'We are on a path to a world in which algorithms will enable us to decode people's mental processes,' said UNESCO's assistant director-general for social and human sciences, Gabriela Ramos. The implications are'far-reaching and potentially harmful,' Ramos said, given breakthroughs in neurotechnology that could'directly manipulate the brain mechanisms' in humans, 'underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions.' The committee's warnings come less than two months after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave Elon Musk's brain-chip implant company Neuralink federal approval to conduct trials on humans.

You can see your stress levels rising as the deadline to finish your memo approached, causing your beta brain wave activity to peak right before an alert popped up, telling you to take a brain break.

Mind-reading technologies pose a "real danger" of discrimination and bias, the Information Commissioner's Office has warned, as it develops specific guidance for companies working in the sci-fi field of neurodata. The use of technology to monitor information coming directly from the brain and nervous system "will become widespread over the next decade", the ICO said, as it moves from a highly regulated medical advancement to a more general purpose technology. It is already being explored for potential applications in personal wellbeing, sport and marketing, and even for workplace monitoring. The current state-of-the-art in the field is demonstrated by individuals like Gert-Jan Oskam, a 40-year-old Dutch man who was paralysed in a cycling accident 12 years ago. In May, electronic implants in his brain gave him the ability to walk. "To many, the idea of neurotechnology conjures up images of science fiction films, but this technology is real and it is developing rapidly," said Stephen Almond, the ICO's executive director of regulatory risk.

All of those fantastical possibilities promised by burgeoning brain-computer interface technology come with the unavoidable cost of needing its potentially hackable wetware to ride shotgun in your skull. Given how often our personal data is already mishandled online, do we really want to trust the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley with our most personal of biometrics, our brainwaves? In her new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University, Nita A. Farahany, examines the legal, ethical, and moral threats that tomorrow's neurotechnologies could pose. From The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany. Assume that Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies soon have their way, and neural interface devices replace keyboards and mice.

Maitreyee Wairagkar is a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Davis, developing assistive neurotechnology using artificial intelligence to restore lost function in people with neurological disorders. She builds brain-computer interfaces to enable people with severe motor and speech impairments to communicate directly via their brain signals by breaking barriers between humans and technology. Previously, she was at Imperial College London and UK Dementia Research Institute where she developed conversational AI and social robots for dementia support.

Private thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings could be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology. Or at least that is what one of the world's leading brain scientists believes. In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of personal liberty. Advances in hacking and tracking thoughts, with Orwellian fears of mind control running just below the surface, is the subject of Farahany's scholarship alongside urgent calls for legislative guarantees to thought privacy, including freedoms from "cognitive fingerprinting", that lie within an area of ethics broadly termed "cognitive liberty". Certainly the field is advancing rapidly.

If you've ever wished your brain was more user-friendly, neurotechnology might seem like a dream come true. It's all about offering you ways to hack your brain, getting it to do more of what you want and less of what you don't want. There are "nootropics" -- also known as "smart drugs" or "cognitive enhancers" -- pills that supposedly give your brain a boost. There's neurofeedback, a tool for training yourself to regulate your brain waves; research has shown it has the potential to help people struggling with conditions like ADHD and PTSD. There's brain stimulation, which uses electric currents to directly target certain brain areas and change their behavior; it's shown promise in treating severe depression by disrupting depression-linked neural activity. Oh, and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are working on brain-computer interfaces that could pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words in real time, which could one day allow you to control your phone or computer with just your thoughts. Some of these technologies can offer very valuable help to people who need it.