Towards the end of 2024, I wrote a piece about our upcoming work on using technology foresight to explore governance aspects of neurotechnology. Fast forward a few months into the present, and the results of this work have been published in a report that you can read here.
Some questions
Neurotechnology is a rapidly emerging field. Our mission started as an exploration of neurotechnology and identifying questions it might raise for policymakers. These questions form Section 3 of the report (pp32-38).
Broadly, we identified eight policy areas that could be impacted by emerging applications of neurotechnologies. These areas are summarised in the table below, each with one of the questions we think should be considered.
| Policy area | Example question for policymakers |
|---|---|
| Consumer protection | Does it make sense to regulate neurotechnology according to its use (medical vs nonmedical) rather than the type of technology used, when the line between medical and non-medical can be blurred? |
| Human health | Are there certain applications that should be more strictly regulated – such as those that can manipulate brain function e.g. memory? |
| Fundamental Rights, including rights of the child | Can policy frameworks take into account that physical characteristics (e.g. skin tone, hair thickness) can lead to different readings? |
| Employment/social affairs/human resources | Who owns the neural data related to a sportsperson/employee when they move to a different club/workplace? |
| Defence, security and law enforcement | Will law enforcement agencies be able to access information from such devices held by third parties? |
| Education | If such devices are found to have beneficial effects, how can equality of access be safeguarded? |
| Research, innovation and digital policy | If such devices are found to have beneficial effects, how can equality of access be safeguarded? |
| Environment and circularity | Can environmental aspects – use of critical raw materials, retrieval of devices, recycling – be addressed? |
Some thoughts on our methodological journey
We used various methods in this piece of work:
- We worked with an expert in the field to look widely at what is going on in this area – from what is already available to possible areas of future development. This activity constituted a sort of horizon scan, albeit not explored in the same way we do in the ESPAS Horizon scanning.
- Based on the horizon scan, we worked within the team to identify the policy areas that we thought were potentially affected by future development of neurotechnology and set out a list of questions for each policy area.
- We then held a workshop to explore future development of neurotechnology and to test the policy areas and questions we had developed. We used the Futures Wheel method to explore possible impacts of specific use cases of neurotechnology devices and then visioning/backcasting to think about what the preferred future might be and what policymakers might need to think about to move towards that future.
I was invited to present our work on neurotechnology to the CPDP.ai conference in Brussels last week. I was part of a session called “The Vision Thing: From Black Mirror to Foresight Planning”, organised by CRISP, a UK research centre.
During my presentation, I noted how examining neurotechnologies – what they are, how they could develop and what that could mean for policymakers – is helping us to develop an approach that could be applied to other emerging technologies. As a result, we are currently thinking about what that process could look like, and how we can use foresight tools and methods to apply structured thinking to these emerging governance issues.
We think this could serve as a really powerful tool for the Commission, as a starting point for a broader process of foresight, assessment and monitoring that feeds into policy, and looks at governance from a more systemic perspective.
Details
- Publication date
- 26 May 2025
- Author
- Joint Research Centre
- Department
- Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology
- EU Policy Lab tags
