Can you hack the Internet Of Brains?
Companies like Elon Musk's mysterious Neuralink work on connecting human brains—the magnificent blobs of neurons—to the internet, the digital land of Russian cats and racism. But some experts are questioning the ethics and security of the internet of brains.Ya think?
Adam Pantanowitz, a lecturer in the school of electrical and information engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, said that having everybody's brains connected to the internet could pose some issues around privacy and potential hacking.
Pantanowitz, along with two engineering students, successfully streamed human brain waves to the internet on an open-source website using an electroencephalogram (EEG) device hooked up to a portable Raspberry Pi computer. They called it the Brainternet (yes, really).
Pantanowitz said researchers could use the information to study the brain waves of a large and varied amount of subjects at a time. "The idea is that eventually we're going to become more connected to the networks around us and we could eventually become Internet of Things nodes on the network ourselves," he told me. "Information can travel from our brains to the networks, and back from the network into our brains."
Though it might sound enticing to have our brains be connected to the internet the same way our toasters are, the thought of having a hacker's mitts in our minds is less so. Regular devices connected to the internet usually don't have great security measures, and can be hacked and turned into botnets for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Pantanowitz said that this will become even more of a problem when researchers cross the frontier of "bidirectional flow of information," where data can be uploaded to a brain instead of just transmitted....MORE
If interested, see also:
Superbrains getting closer? Musk ‘lines up $100m’ to fund Neuralink brain-computer interface "
Previous Neuralink links, starting with the above ref'd Tim Urban piece:
A Deep Dive Into What Elon Musk Is Up To With His Neuralink Company
....MUCH, MUCH MORE"5 Neuroscience Experts Weigh in on Elon Musk's Mysterious "Neural Lace" Company"
You won't believe how much more
Questions America Wants Answered: Would Elon Musk's Neuralink Solve All of Accounting’s Problems?
"Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI" UPDATED
"Too Funny: Reporting On Elon Musk's New Brain Implant Company, The Nerds at Boy Genius Report..."
In other news...
Related:
But what about rockets? For the asteroid mining cancer cures?
