The writer is the Unesco director-general

The brain is the last refuge of our private thoughts. Who can imagine being unable to keep one’s thoughts to oneself? While we remain far from true mind-reading technology, science has taken steps towards decoding our thoughts. Neurotechnology, a fast-evolving field dedicated to understanding the brain and creating technologies that interact with it, can access, assess and even manipulate our neural systems.

This year, neurotechnology took a leap forwards when Meta conducted a series of experiments integrating magnetoencephalography (MEG) — a brain scanning technology which measures the magnetic fields generated by brain activity — with generative artificial intelligence. Meta says it decoded “visual representations in the brain” with millisecond precision.