Neurosecurity: Dawn of the Brain Hackers

of course I have. I mean having watched and enjoyed such films as The Ring, as Video Drone, like, just the idea of there being some sort of in these cases media, But we can easily extrapolate that to to digital media or just digital information. You can't help but think, is there is there something like that that could exist that would have a devastating or even lethal effect on

anyone who interacted with it? Yeah, video file, audio file, computer program, something that comes out of the digital interface and actually harms you. Well, it's not hard to see how you could harm somebody indirectly with something like that. One example would be a computer virus that takes down a lot of systems or causes widespread economic damage. That's been happening since the eighties as well discussed. Yeah, certainly so.

Widespread economic damage means people lose their jobs, and statistically we know that that will indirectly lead to some number of deaths above the mean mortality rate. But I mean something more direct obviously, you know, I'm talking about the cyborg ninja kind of stuff, But take away the cyborg ninja, I'm not talking about robot assassins or at least personal data like that's been another big one to write. I've seen accounts where people have said this individual is potentially

suicidal over the leakage of the images, video or personal information. Sure, that's the devastating effect of digital gossip. But couldn't malicious hacker injured or assassinate somebody just with a digital file

directly a piece of computer code video? Yeah, I mean, this is of course an increasingly important consideration, you know, because we just look at all the things around us that are becoming connected to the Internet that you know, years ago, I would have thought, why would I need my, uh let's say, my thermostat to be connected to the internet. It seems crazy, and yet here I am in the future.

Especially during the cold months, I enjoyed waking up grabbing my phone and adjusting the thermostat, warming up the house. And at the same time, I'm thinking, is this a little crazy that this electric you know, gas powered fire in my home is now controlled by a device that is connected to the internet and all the horrors of the Internet. I end up just having to like stick, you know, push that out of my brain and just focus on the fact, Oh I can before I get out of bed, I can, I can make it a

little warmer. Now. Fortunately, there are limits to what you're amostatic can do. Right, You're not worried about some crazy kid on four Chan deciding that he wants to cook you alive and turning your house thermostat up to five hundred degrees. But the more we think about a smart house, like there was some horrible sci fi movie that came out years and years ago, and it had a smart house that where the robot you know, goes completely how on everybody, and it had like a terminator arm that

hangs from the ceiling and like travels around the house. Uh. I, As I keep thinking back to that, the more interconnected our homes become, and now that you know, the whole idea of like your house becoming self aware and killing you is one thing. But yeah, just the idea that all these things are connected, at least in a small way, to everyone else in the world, it can be a little much. This was explored to great effect in the

wonderful Stephen King movie Maximum Overdrive. I'm just kidding, not not such a great movie, but the premises all our machines turn against us, right, our consumer technology, from truck to household appliances start trying to kill us. I think in the movie it's aliens, right, I can't remember in the movie. In the book, I mean the short story rather, it was delightfully vague. Um. And then of course Maximum

Overdrive the film as its own experience. But I guarantee you there's got to be a script out there where someone has taken Maximum Overdrive, or at least trucks the original story and upgraded it to the you know, the so called Internet of things. Yeah, and the most obvious analogy from the movie is going to be autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles if have if they have the wrong security exploits, if people can manipulate them in the wrong ways, it's not hard at all to see how they can be deadly. But I want to get even more insidious about devices that we personally hold in our hands and used to mediate our relationship with regular information like text and video. And you know ideas. I've got an archived Wired magazine article enti idled hackers assault epilepsy patients via computer and

this is from March two thousand eight. And what happened in this uh incident is that somebody attacked an epilepsy support message board hosted by a group called the Epilepsy Foundation. And just to read a quote about what happened quote, the incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March twenty two, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded

with flashing, animated gifts. The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern

sensitive epileptics. And then later in the article they note and this is worth noting, epilepsy effects about fifty million people worldwide, but only about three percent of those people are photosensitive, meaning you've often heard, you know, the old Pokemon story that flashing lights or flashing images can cause seizures and people with epilepsy. That is true for some

people with epilepsy, but not all. So the risk here is not necessarily like a wide attack where you just end up hitting that small percentage of people who are affected. But what have you targeted it after a specific individual? And this is apparently happened. Now we have this story from twenty sixteen where there's an American journalist named Kurt

Aikenwald who was known publicly to have photosensitive epilepsy. And during the election, so he's a political journalist and of course being a political journalist you make enemies, and somebody who did not like his political coverage sent him a series of tweets with strobing light images. Uh and allegedly this caused a seizure. And so he is now a witnessed in a criminal prosecution against these digital attackers who attacked his physical body. And we're able to cause a

physical injury with just information through an interface. It's interesting that it took place on Twitter too, because I mean, Twitter is known to be this place where like a lot of the Internet where where people feel like they can be just as nasty and awful as they possibly can without any repercussions. And and here we see a situation where it ends up transcending nearly the hurting of feelings or or psychological damage, but actual physical attack. Yeah.

But while almost anybody can be psychologically harmed by information received through an interface, it's really difficult in general to physically harm somebody with information received through a standard you know, digital media interface. It's really rare. Like, there is this one specific exploit in the brains of three percent of people or so who have epilepsy. That means that certain types of light images projected on a screen can cause

physical injury or it can trigger a seizure. Not everybody's epileptic, not, not all people with epilepsy have this condition, so it's it's pretty rare. But this is one neurological vulnerability to information based weapons built right into some of our brains. Most of the time, for most people, the brain is very secure, right, It's it's hard to cause direct injury to somebody's body, or steal their innermost secrets, or do

anything like that with information interfaces alone. But today, we want to talk about how that state of affairs is very likely changing, and it may be changing very soon, because we want to talk about the coming age of neuro security. And the crazy thing here is that we're not talking about something that may come to pass. We're talking about, as you'll see, as we discussed this further, this is something that is definitely going to happen, that

needs to happen, an inevitable next step. Yeah, and unless basically life or technological progress on Earth stops right now. This is not a singularity issue. This is not This is a very near future concern, yes, and and very very plausible based on things that we already have today. So there are several different things that you could call

neuro security. One thing would be using neuroscience principles in the general field of security, right protecting your borders with f m r I brain scanners during border stop interrogations or something right picking up say, for instance, if you could use this technology to pick up on like extreme levels of nervousness that might need to be inspected with additional questions, or if it was even possible to tell that there was some sort of malicious intent or stocking

up your t s A. The ranks of your t s A agents with scanners. I mean, like from the movie Scanners Psychic Psychic t s A. Okay, yes, it's basically scanner cops, the sequel to My God. You're right, scanner cops. Can you imagine the faces they make while you're standing in line? But that make flying better because it makes it funnier or worse because it'd be even creepier. Probably creepy, I'm guessing creepy. Sorry, Well, that's an interesting subject,

but a subject for a different day. Today, we're talking about the security of our biological information systems, essentially applying computer cybersecurity principles to your brain and your nervous system. Now, you might be asking, that sounds ridiculous. Why would you ever talk about that? I mean, that's that's just such a weird sci fi scenario. Nothing like that's ever gonna happen,

right right, I mean to bring up scanners again. It just makes me think of the first Scanners movie that at the time I thought ridiculous moment where the scanners are interfacing with the computer with their brain, and that threw me completely out of the movie because I'm because I'm like, all right, you you. I'm on board with brain to brain the psychic connections, but you're throwing me off when I'm trying to imagine a brain to machine

connection that's just purely based on psychic power. It does seem to violate the magic of the film, right, It gets it gets the mythology out of whack because there's a scene in the movie Scanners where one of the scanners he gets on a telephone and he calls into a computer system and he reads the mind of the computer system. Yeah, and he wasn't even making facts machine noises with his mouth. That that I would have been on board with, but yeah, not the way Cronenberg decided

to to display it. Michael Ironside could have sold those facts machine noises with his mouth, but not the guy they had play in the Here. So we're going to talk about a particular study that I'll get to a couple different times in this episode. But actually it might be wrong to call it a study because it's really more an attempt at definitions, right, trying to lay out what the concept of neuro security would be and what

are some things we need to watch out for. And so this was published in two thousand nine in the journal Neurosurgical Focus. It's called neuro Security, Security and Privacy for Neural Devices from Tamara Dinning, Yoki Matsuka, and tada Yoshi Kono. So the authors of this paper note that there are three primary goals in computer security. You've got confidentiality, integrity, and availability. So confidentiality means what you think it does.

It means an attacker of your computer system should not be able to exploit the device to learn or expose private information. Standard example would be hacker steals your bank account info, or your private emails or your private photos. Yeah, these are essentially externalizations of my private thoughts, and I don't want anyone to have access to either exactly now. The next one was integrity. Integrity means that an attacker should not be able to quote change device settings or

initiate unauthorized operations. In other words, the attackers should not be able to use this device whatever it is, computer, cell phone, anything like that. Should not be able to use it for their own purposes or change what the device does for the primary user. An example here might be that a hacker could take over your computer to turn it into a bot. That's part of a bot net to have a d D O S attack against some website. Maybe they had a bad meal at Olive Garden.

They want to take down the Olive Garden homepage, so they hijack your computer and make your computer one of many computers that bombard Olive Garden with with requests to load the page. Okay, and obviously I would not want that to happen in my brain, either to change the settings on my brain and ultimately change my behavior, change my motivations, like even if it's done in a very slap dash awkward way, like you know, hands out of

my brains exactly. So the last one is availability. Availability means that the attackers should not be able to destroy or disable the device or do anything that would render it unavailable to the user. Classic example, hackered deletes all your files or alters the computer's boot procedures so that it won't load your operating system on startup and it

just becomes useless. Likewise, I don't want anyone to strategically remove memories from my brain, to wipe my memories from my brain, or to even temporarily deactivate certain cognitive centers or networks in my brain. Yeah. Now, in these examples you're talking about, you're talking about sort of whole brain functionality, but there could be dire consequences for much lower stakes questions. Somebody might not necessarily be able to disable your entire brain.

But in a minute, we're going to talk about some particular types of neuro technology. And in many of these cases, for example, just disabling your neuro technology could have devastating consequences for you. They wouldn't have to be able to turn off your brain. They might just be able to turn off your neural implant at a time and place that would make you very vulnerable or could hurt you.

I experienced something like this the the weekend. I had to drive to a major phone service providers m brick and mortar store that I'd never been to before, and I had to do it without a functional phone. So I had managed I ended up printing out the wrong directions map quest or you know whatever map program I I used. It's amazing how dependently could come. Yeah, so in a way, it was it was like a part of my brain was not functioning because the phone was

not functioning. You have offloaded part of your traditional capability something maybe ten or fifteen years ago, you would have probably had better internal mechanisms for locating a store you needed to get to. Uh, And now you've said, well, I don't have to worry about that anymore. That's in this peripheral that I used to supplement my brain. But if the peripheral breaks, you're you're messed up. Now. Yeah, and that is technology that exists, you know, quite literally,

you know, arms distance away from the brain. But the thing is we're seeing the technology creep increasingly closer to the brain. And then what happens when that stuff goes offline or becomes compromised. So to quote the authors of the study I mentioned, they say, quote, we define neuro security as the protection of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of neural devices from malicious parties, with the goal of preserving the safety of a person's neural mechanisms, neural computation, and

free will. Now we're going to look directly at some of the neural technologies that might be vulnerable to security concerns like this. But before we do that, I think we should look more broadly at the idea of information security, because if you're not all that familiar with the history of the Internet. It might be kind of puzzling to you, like, why is the Internet so horrible in terms of security? We we've got this global thing, what would you even

call it? Would you call it a technology? We've got this global information civilization that is just terrible. It is just terrible in terms of security. There there is not an overarching strategy to keep everything safe. I keep thinking of it like the cat's cradle that you create with the with the length of string and your fingers, and you, you know, you interweave your fingers and you create a pattern so that the Internet in this case, it's not

the string, it's not the fingers. It couldn't exist this without the string and the fingers. It's ultimately that shape. You know. That's kind of a loose way I think about it. Well, maybe we should take a quick break and when we get back, we can look at how the Internet ended up becoming so vulnerable to security concerns. All right, we're back, So, yes, how did the Internet

end up becoming so vulnerable? Now? This is on one thing to take me on a trip on fear and paranoia memory lane, And I'll try and keep this this fun too. I guess if if you're a fan of like Halt and catch fire, it's kind of fun to think of it in those terms. But yeah, I mean, on one hand, it's an easy question to ask because we live in a day where we have ransomware attacks,

identity theft, docsining, invasion of privacy. But on the other hand, so many of us were born into this system of the internet, or you know, or we if you're like me, you entered into it during college, and it's easy to just assume that the systems that run the world and the organizations that were in the world haven't figured out to some extent. You know, you expect the bank to be secure, You expect some security to to be in place.

There are some rather significant security options to be in place, so you would assume that the the virtual bank would be much the same. Right if you were to just find out that there are human sized holes in the bank vault that keeps your money, that would be rather surprising. It's not surprising at all to find out that there are hacker sized holes in the digital systems that protect

your private information. I mean, how many times now if we had the story about some online retailer or maybe even physical retailer that you did business with and they have your credit card number. They got hacked, and now your information belongs to somebody out there and you have to get a new credit card or something like that. Yeah, and I think we can all relate to that kind of anxiety. Yeah. Now, I mentioned earlier that that so many of us were a number of our listeners here

were born into the Internet age. So I'm going to try and put this in turn, like the origins of the Internet, in terms of something that maybe more of us could understand, but then not maybe not the younger people, but for a number of you out there. I bet you can remember the day that your mom joined Facebook. So you remember the realization that oh crap, this this

internet thing, this this really is for everyone. It's that horrible moment where something that you and your friends do online that you think of as not real life comes crashing into real life and you realize like, ohhh, this is connected to the same universe where I live. Yeah, yeah, I remember. There was like a sharp contrast, certainly between

the MySpace aide. Remember what it felt like to be on my Space was totally different than the early stages of Facebook, which was, which was completely different from what Facebook would become in terms of you know, just earlier models just felt like, oh, I'm just surrounded by like minded people who share my my same sort of attitude

on life and and values about what's important. And granted, there's there was already a certain amount of bubble construction there, but but yeah, we we just we we had expectations about what this this technology was and who this technology was for, And the same situation really applies to the Internet as a whole. It's architects did not build it from the ground up as a global system for the masses,

a cat's cradle weaved around the fingers of so many computers. No, they designed it as an online community for a few dozen researchers. It was a research project. It was like, Hey, we've got these computers at different universities and institutions. What if we could link them together so they could trade information? Would that be weird? I don't think that. Maybe some people did, but it doesn't seem like generally they predicted that this would become a hub of commerce and recreation

for everybody on the planet. Yeah, I mean, it's you can you can't help, but compare it to say empires, right, can you imagine you have uh, you know Genghis Khan and he's sitting around and uh and they're saying, hey, Genghis, what's up? And he said, oh, not much. I got this idea though, I'm going to call it the Mongol Empire. Huh. And this is how it's gonna work. This is how we're gonna incorporate trade and the and this is how

we're gonna value different religions. And there was whoa, you haven't even none of this stuff is even conquered yet. What are you talking about, like the people who found these these major movements and organizations? Like how often is the complete structure baked into the original design? Almost never? Each step is improvised. So you've got to make decisions about design. You make design decisions on the fly as issues come up. And the Internet was sort of the

same way. Yeah, you gotta leave it to Kubla to figure out the rest. So um, there's a wonderful Washington Post article that that that goes into this in depth. It's titled a Flaw in the Design and uh And I'll include a link to this on the landing page for this episode it's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. In the article, the author speaks with such Internet forefathers as M. I. T scientists David D. Clark, David H. Crocker, and Vinton G. Surf. They point out that they thought

they could simply exclude untrustworthy people. Is that great, We'll just we'll just keep the security risks off of the Internet. Yeah. So when they thought about security, and they did think a little bit about security, they thought about it mainly in terms of protecting the system from outside intruders or military threats. So there's a quonderful quote in this article from Surf, and he says, quote, we didn't focus on

how you could wreck this system intentionally. You could argue with hindsight that we should have, but getting this thing to work at all was non trivial. They dealt with problems as they arose, and the problems then we're making it work, and now this is going to have some very interesting parallels once we start talking about neurotechnology again. They also point out that at the time there really

wasn't much of value in the Internet. Uh. The analogy they make again to the bank people break into banks despite the security because or the attempt to break in because there's money there, because there's something of value, right, You wouldn't break into a bank vault or you know, risk prison time for a bank vault that was full of what transcripts of messages back and forth between academics. Yeah, I mean, unless you're just in it for the pure artistry of it. But that rarely seems to be the

case outside of like a Hollywood movie. But then, of course, in the early days of computers, you did start actually encountering security threats. Yeah. The big one that really changed everything was the Morris worm attack. Crashed thousands of machines, It got millions of dollars in damage, and it helped us. You're in the multibillion dollar computer security business. Bless the maker and his water. Yeah, I mean at this point

that the party was over. Oh by the way. Interestingly enough, the article also points out that the big idea behind the Internet is at least partially attributed to American engineer Paul Barron, who worked for the Rand Corporation at the time, and he saw the need for a communication system that would function after a nuclear at strike on the United States that would help us with eight efforts help us preserve democratic governance and even enable a counter strike, all

in order to help quote the survivors of the Holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly. What yeah, um, I mean that bringing this Cold War mentality to the Internet. Uh, it's so crazy thinking about the way contextual frames completely

shift around the technologies that we create. Yeah. And the crazy thing too is that every time there's a headline about, say, meddling in elections with the you know, with with various online initiatives, or hacking initiatives, or the recent ransomware attack, it makes me realize, well, this is this is what cyber war looks like. This is this is the shape

of global cyber warfare. And you look back and here's this guy dreaming of the The Internet is this thing outside of war, this thing that's just a communication system.

It helps rebound from assaults by by various estates. But it's also this is creating the Internet in the context of thinking about international warfare, but thinking about it in terms of overt frontal warfare, missile bombardments and troop advancements and all the traditional types of war people knew about, not realizing that the Internet would enable a state of constant covert war between great powers that would just be

constantly secretly or semi secretly undermining one another. Yeah, and there would the kind of this gray area about how how you respond? How do you how do you react? How does what are the rules of cyber warfare? And people still haven't figured that out. So that Washington Post article is a great exploration of Internet security history. But the basic answer to our initial question is this, you know, why is the Internet when of the Internet end up

becoming so vulnerable? It's because the Internet wasn't built to be secure. All security concerns are an add on an aftermarket edition a patch. Security is always difficult, especially when it wasn't baked into the design and and and with these systems that we're talking about, it almost never is.

We see the same situation occurring with with some of the gadgets and implants and proposed neural technologies we're going to discuss, because a primary goal ends up to being what to aid the patient to somehow to achieve the goal of the device or the technology. Right, if you're designing neurotechnology to help regain some lost functionality and somebody with a brain injury or a body injury, or to cure some kind of neurodegenerative disease, or at least offset

it's negative effects. Security. I mean, that's just such a far down the road concern. You're you're worried about fixing people's problems and helping their lives. That's what you're worried about. And it's the same thing you talked about with the Internet earlier, that you know, people were just wondering if they could make it work. Security is so far down the list of concerns. Yeah again, security becomes this add on. It's this thing that you you you end up implementing

or worrying about once the threat becomes more apparent. Oh yeah, security, not not in the kool aid man sense of oh yeah, but like the oh yeah, oh yeah, this there's a man sized hole in the wall. We need to do something about this. So I want to go back to that paper I mentioned earlier in Neurosurgical Focus from two thousand nine, where they try to lay out a framework

for approaching the topic of neuro security. And so the authors make the point that neurotechnology is becoming more effective and one of the things that we can draw out from this is that as it becomes more effective, it's going to become more useful, And as it becomes more useful, it's going to become more widespread. And is it becomes more widespread, it will be more fully integrated into our bodies and our lives. And so there are a lot

of current and potential uses of neurotechnology. One thing would be treating brain disorders. Another thing might be making paralyzed limbs usable again, or allowing users to control robotic limbs with thoughts alone. One thing might be remote controlling robots with thoughts. That's a fun one. Another one might be

enhancing human cognitant of capacity. So up until the present, most research into the safety of neurotechnology is focused on making sure the device itself doesn't hurt you when it's functioning the way it's supposed to write. Safety concerns are about making sure that the intended use of the neuro

technology is safe. And this makes sense because back in two thousand nine, at the time this paper was published, most of these devices were number one, contained in lab environments, you know, they're just not getting out into the wild very much. And number two were self contained systems, meaning that they had very little limited transaction with the other

information systems in the outside world. Back when you had an Apple two and no Internet connection, you're probably not going to get a virus, right unless you're one of the very few unlucky people to get handed and infected floppy disk and you stick it into your disk drive. Of course, once you start connecting your computers to the Internet, your security vulnerability goes way up. Uh. And here's a cybersecurity mantraid posit for you. The more your device plays outdoors,

the more vulnerable it is. Yeah. And this means that as a device gets connected to the Internet, interacts with a larger number of devices, adds wireless capabilities, all all those things, there are more ways for it to be compromised by malicious adversaries. And as devices become more useful and more widely adopted, they tend to play outdoors more

and more. If and so, what the authors are saying is that if we don't design robust security features in them from the get go, we could end up with neurotech that works like the Internet we just talked about, where it's it's an ad hoc system of security fixes It's this constant race between security updates and malicious hackers, and every time the bad guys pull ahead, they have the ability to bring a little taste of doom with them, except this time the target isn't your computer or even

your bank account or your Facebook account. It's your nervous system. And people probably will not find that acceptable, the victims of such accounts. That is, because inevitably the trend we see is that there will be somebody who decides that such an attack on an individual is a good idea for whatever kind of whatever reasons they have, or just sort of the the impersonal nature of online victimization. Oh yeah,

I mean, of course they're going to be motives. One of the things the authors point out is just straightforward cruelty. Think of the cruelty, both random and targeted, that we've talked about of those epilepsy strobe attacks. I mean, that's just sick. But apparently people think that's okay to do. There are people out there who are willing to inflict injury on others because they think they can get away

with it. But then think about the possible financial and blackmail incentives that would be open to someone who compromised your brain itself, and then think about malicious interfering that is self directed. One example of this might be UH, in a minute, we're going to talk about the idea of deep brain stimulation or DBS. But there's a possibility, for example, of neurotech users to hack their own devices

in an act of harmful self medication. So in the same way that you might abuse a prescription for painkillers, you could potentially abuse your neuro technology using it in a way that it's not intended that could be harmful to you in the long run but feels good in the present. Well, or to frame that another way, you could you could have a situation from where people are optimizing that their technology in a way that demand does not approve of. Yeah, you could have that, or you

could have One example is overclocking computers. Right, people want to over clock their CPUs. Sometimes you see people messing around with their hardware and it means that you know, I know I can get more power out of my CPU if I if I make some adjustments to what it will allow itself to do. But that comes along with risks, right, you could risk overheating your computer or something like that. If people decide they want to do

the same thing with their brains. Yeah. Yeah, then I mean basically you could say, I'm going to trade the potential to have more power in my brain with the potential for some risk. Yeah. I mean people do that every day when they they look at various pharmaceutical ways to potentially augment their brain for the completion of a task or some sort of creative endeavor. And reminds me.

I believe it was Jimmy Page of led Zeppelin who has in some interviews like look back on past drug use and and said, well, yeah, that was probably too much, but look at what I got done. Look look at

the work that came out during that time. I'm not sure if this is something he said or this was commentary on his life, but I mean you could see someone making the argument with technology to say, yeah, I overclocked my uh neural augmentations, but look what I got done, right, Sure did a lot of homework, so you could say, and I think the authors of this two thousand nine articles say that we're at a similar stage in the evolution of neural engineering as we were at the inception

of the Internet. Neuro Security is not really much of an issue today, but it could be a huge, massively important concern in the near future. And the consequence of a neuro security breach can be a lot worse than a breach of Internet security. Instead of protecting the software on somebody's computer, you're protecting a humans ability to think

and enjoy good health. Right, Yeah, you're getting far because because that's the thing, right, when all these bad things happen, So you suffer, even an identity threat, you can always say, well, hey, at least nobody was hurt. At least I didn't you know, nobody physically attacked me. But here we see that line somewhat erased. So a few current trends in neuro technology that are definitely going to up the stakes and increase

the risks. One of these things is wireless connectivity. The authors in this paper they recognize that security vulnerabilities do exist in wireless implanted medical devices, and in past research they demonstrated that a hacker could certainly compromise the security and privacy of such a device, such as a two

thousand three model implanted cardiac defibrillator. You see, you could they found using homemade, low cost equipment wireless lee change a patient's therapies, disable those therapies, or induce a life threatening heart rhythm. And they and this was a two thousand and two thousand nine publication, but the things have moved on a bit since then. But even then at the time they said, look, the current risk is very low, but such threats have to be taken into account with

future designs. So there's increasing wireless connectivity of all types of implanted devices, including neural peripherals. But the other thing we need to take into account for increasing security risks is the increasing complexity of these devices. The more a device does, the more there is to worry about from a security concern. Yeah, and this is an area where I to make sense to this. I keep thinking about

a chessboard. In a chess game, as many of you might be aware, Like chess has a set number of pieces, a set playing field, and uh in a set rule system. And people have been playing with these limitations for a long time, and in doing so they've kind of figured out, you know, all the basic moves that can take place early in the game and it it's opening the openings. Yeah, and you it takes a while to get to that point where you're actually in fresh territory where you're playing

a game that has not been played before. So it's chess. Is not like a modern board game where the board game comes out and then they might have a new rule, suit supplement, or a new expansion, and each time a new expansion comes out, ohops, they broke the game will a bit or the rules, this rule clashes with this older rule, and we need somebody to to weigh in and tell us, uh, you know how we actually play

the game. Now, Chess doesn't change. Chess remains the same, and our our our world of interconnected devices does not stay the same. It changes. It is a It is a modern board game that gets gets a larger playing field, gets more pieces and more complex rules pretty much every day. Now, I think we should zero in on some specific examples of neurotechnologies. One would be robotic limbs. Now, I think this is a great example of something that has made

enormous strides just in the past couple of decades. Robotic limbs are not the future, this is the present. Multiple labs and inter organizational projects have already created robotic limbs that can be controlled directly by brain activity, just like the muscles and a natural limb, and these things are better all the time. That's right. Now, to go back in time just a little bit back in two thousand thirteen, Bertold Meyer wrote an article for Wired titled ethical questions

are Looming for prosthetics. Now. Meyer had a unique insight in this article because he wears a prosthetic arm himself, and he tried out many different models over the years, so he's not you know, he's an insider when it comes to prosthetics and the use of high tech prosthetics.

So at the time he was using an i limb which connected to his iPhone, which of course was connected to the Internet, and he wrote, technically, a part of my body has become hackable and uh, and he pointed to concerns by crime futurist Mark Goodman, also a Wired writer, and Mark Goodman covered the fact had previously covered the fact that hackers had developed a Bluetooth device that can cause portable insulin pumps used by certain diabetics to give

their where a lethal dose. Oh yeah, this is another one of the vulnerabilities of hackable implanted devices that don't even necessarily connect to the nervous system or the brain right. And if anyone out there is a fan of the TV show Homeland, there's actually a plot involving in a vice presidential assassination attempt in the show U utilizing just such a strategy. I've never watched that show is a good I enjoyed. I only watched the first two seasons,

but I enjoyed it. So Meyer argues that we we have to recognize and address such hacking sensitivities before the technology is widely adopted and hacking becomes a full fledged threat, which just is exactly what we've been we've been saying over again. So Myer's on the same page as the authors of this article we were talking about earlier that they're saying. The main thing is we got to get ahead of it. We've got to start thinking about neurosecurity

before these threats really become an issue. Now, there are plenty of labs that have been working on robotic limbs, thought controlled robotic limbs. One more example I wanted to mention there was a good article in the New York Times in May about the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab where they've got this robotic arm. It's got twenty six joints and it can curl up to forty five pounds.

Is that more than my biological arm concurl. I wonder get into an arm wrestling contest with one of these robot arms. I don't know. I feel like we're getting into the weight of human hair scenarios. Well, anyway, these things it's controlled entirely by the brain, and so it is just that you connect this to what your natural neural impulses would be, and you can't. You don't have to operate any external controls or machinery. You just control it with your brain. There was also a good article

I saw and wired from last year. I think about President Obama just freaking out when he was watching somebody control a prosthetic arm with his brain. Uh, he like couldn't contain his glee. Yeah, I mean, it's it's amazing, Like and that's the thing that the technology has so many wonderful applications, um and and all of these additional threats kind of come second to that at least when you're you're focusing on the wonder Yeah. And so there are a couple ways you could say that neural devices

would come into limb control. So one of them would be restoring the use of a disabled limb, Like if you have some kind of neurological damage or disease that means you still have an arm or a leg, but that you can't control it with your brain. One thing a neural device could do is give that control back to you. Another thing would be that you've lost the arm or the limb and that you have a robotic

replacement that you can control with your brain. Yeah, these are These are two possibilities that that come up time and time again in you know, wired magazine articles and another cool uh cool, you know forward facing technological publications. Now we've mentioned a couple of arms, but that they're prosthetic legs too, right, Yes, I was looking around. I came across Blatchford's links prosthetic and this communicates from knee

to ankle four times a second. So it's a stem in which the foot and knee of the prosthetic limb work to work together to predict how it's where is going to move and respond to the position. And this too features a bluetooth connection to a smartphone to help manage this interaction to like uh ad just settings and things like that. Yeah, so I mean, I guess that doesn't rely on the smartphone CPU to do it's computation. I guess that would be difficult. Um, my understanding is

that this was about like tweaking performance. Okay, so but it's easy. That's the thing when you can see a lot of these technologies. Perhaps they start with using a wireless connection to tweak performance, but then it becomes more right, then it becomes about downloading new firmware. Then it becomes about actually using the computational power of the device or

the cloud even to control the prosthetic. All right, so maybe it's time to think about what would be the security concerns of a robotic limb or a neurotechnologically enabled limb. One thing I got to think about is the concept of a ransomware attack. So we've recently seen ransomware attacks all over the world, right. I think they're now saying that the North Korean government might be behind these ransomware attacks that have hit like the British NHS and all

these other places. As of this recording, I believe there is some speculation that that might be the case. But I was reading an expert, an expert who was saying well, we're still looking at it, so okay. But the basic concept of ransomware attack is you know, I've seen this on relatives computers before, where you boot up Oh yeah, like you. I mean, this is a classic type of attack.

You boot up your computer and there's a message that says, like from Microsoft Anti Virus Protection or something, Uh, your system is not secure. You must pay to renew your anti virus license in order to boot up your system, and they ask for your credit card number, and so they're they're holding your technology hostage. In that case, they're pretending to be somebody legitimate, but they could just come right out and say, look, I've got all your files.

I'm not going to let you into your phone unless you give me a hundred bucks. And that was basically how this this recent want to cry um ransom bot attack. Right. But imagine if this was applied to neurotechnology that re enabled you to move your limbs. So let's say you're out hiking with your amazing robotic legs. You've lost control of your legs, or you lost your legs in an accident.

You've got robotic legs, and you're out walking around in the mountains and suddenly they lock in place and refuse to move. And then you get a text message demanding a ransom payment of five hundred dollars worth of bitcoin or your attacker will not unlock your legs. What do you do? You you gotta at least take a chance that they're going to make good on the promise. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how how sci fi things can get so quickly. I mean that that's really does not

seem all that far fetched to me. Another thing might be, how about a confidentiality attack, so that that lass type of remember the three categories we mentioned earlier of neuro security categories, you want to protect to the availability, the confidentiality, and the integrity. That would be an availability attack, right they say you will not be able to use your device unless you pay up. You could have a confidentiality attack. That would be a skimming attack on your robotic arms.

Say an attacker gains control of your robotic arms, then uses motion data to infer what you're typing whenever you use your fingers to type a message. Or how about an integrity attack the attacker literally makes you punch or choke yourself, or punch or choke others by taking control of your robotic hands. Well, this reminds me of a video clip that I actually included in the notes here.

I'm not sure if you've seen this, but it was just a was a gentleman on a believe of French news program showing off a prosthetic arm and he activates and it it begins to malfunction, and it just kind of starts pounding on the table and then pounding on the man's thigh and he can't get it to turn off. So you can easily imagine where even something wouldn't have to be is is is uh as precise as making

you go karate chop crazy on people around you. But what have you just started making your arm, you know, go into sort of spasms that that could be bad enough, especially I mean if you were driving a car at the time, if you were if you were giving a public presentation. Uh, there any number of scenarios were just uh, the utter malfunction of the device would be bad enough. Now, I know a lot of you out there are probably thinking like, well, I wouldn't I wouldn't get a robotic

limb like that if there are risks like this. But you're probably not putting yourself really in the frame of mind that that somebody who has lost control of a limb or lost a limb would experience. I mean, imagine not having that ability and having the technological capability to regain it. This is not something that I think people

can really be faulted for wanting. No, I mean, I mean that's the thing, like is the is the if it improves the technology, it makes the technology better able to you know, let an in a visual cope with a lost limb, and then is that that technology becomes the standard. Of course people are going to adapt it. Yeah, this is the thing people are gonna want for good reason. And it's definitely, especially at the beginning, going to seem like the risks are very low, and hopefully they will be. Yeah.

So uh, I do want to say here, you know, when it comes to hackable prosthetic limbs, it isn't all black mirror paranoia. There is a lighter side as well, and this is where the Lego Prosthetic Arm comes into play. Designed by Chicago based Colombian designer Carlos Alturo Torres, and it's a modular system that allows children to customize their own prosthetics. So this is a lesson in engineering programming and a way to help them overcome the social isolation

they might feel over their condition. So I just found it to be an interesting little side note. Well, yeah, we already mentioned in a perhaps dangerous or detrimental context the idea of hacking your own neuro pros theses, which that that could certainly be the case. But I can also see hacking your own neuro pros thesis to be something that's very like fun and adventurous and exciting. I guess it would just depend on what the risks and

and the dangers were. Oh man, what have we reached the point to just have a little fun with it? What have they a hacked? Either you hack it or you know, someone outside hacks your prosthetic arm and it makes a hand puppet and then it's able to talk specifically in the void. Who is the famous hand puppet here? I don't know. It would do kind of like a kind of like a you know, a cartoony Spanish accent to the to the talking hand. You know what I'm talking.

I don't know what you're talking about, Senior Wins. Is that I don't know? No, I have no idea anyway, I can't help but imagine like a hacked robotic arm suddenly just becoming this little talking fifth It's like that it starts screaming at you. So add that to the list of near future concerns. Well, I can think of a good one is that you'd hack your own arm to just make it, at random intervals throughout the day throw up the rock horns. Then you'd have no warning

when it was going to happen. You just say, like, fair warning to all my friends and family. Every now and then, I'm going to rock out. You've got to get the horns or every now and then I may just flip you off. It's not because I don't like you, it's just I've been hacked. Sorry. Uh, it becomes a great excuse. So yeah, there are multiple sides definitely to

having systems that are flexible and can be manipulated. I mean, you could see that as a security risk, which it probably is, but you can also see it as an opportunity for people to express their themselves and and try new things with their own bodies. Indeed, well, in that note, you know, we should take a quick break and when we come back, we will get into some some some other possible areas where neuro technology could become hacked. Alright,

we're back, okay, Robert. One more type of neurotechnology that is highlighted in this original paper on neuro security is the concept of deep brain stimulation. Yes, now we I think we've talked about this some of the podcast before, but deep brain stimulation is basically putting electrodes deep inside the brain to stimulate certain regions with electrical impulses. It's uh in the basic idea is fairly simple. Of course,

the implementation is very complex. Yeah. We get into this in our brain to brain communication episode, which I'll include a link to on the landing page for this episode

of stuffitably your Mind dot Com. But yeah, essentially you have sort of the external version, it's kort of the god helmet scenario right where you're doing, you know, electromagnetic cranial stimulation, and then the idea of of actually putting the the the the the the devices inside the head actually having implants in the brain that are manipulating cognitive Yeah, and there's all kinds of uses of putting electrodes in

the brain. Deep brain stimulation specifically is is putting them deep down in there to help with multiple types of chronic medical conditions. Specifically, it's been effective at dealing with Parkinson's disease and with tremors what you might see called essential tremor, but also contains uses that have been tried out, such as for treating major depression or for chronic pain.

And so obviously, the better we get at correcting problems that begin in the brain with with electrical impulses, that that is a great thing for the people who suffer from these conditions. But when you're putting the capability to send electrical impulses deep within the brain in the hands of a piece of technology, you want to make really sure that that technology is doing what it's supposed to do. As you can guess, there could be a lot of

problems with unwanted electrical mulation of the brain. And one thing I just want to quote a paragraph from the two thousand nine paper we mentioned quote, the hacker strategy does not need to be too sophisticated if he or she only wants to cause harm. It is possible to cause cell death or the formation of meaningless neural pathways by bombarding the brain with random signals. Alternately, a hacker

might wirelessly prevent the device from operating as intended. We must also ensure that the deep brain stimulators protect the feelings and emotions of patients from external observation. So you

can see there are a lot of avenues here. Also, deep brain stimulation was one of the things we had in mind when we talked about the idea of of illicit or dangerous self use, like if you are self administering patterns of electrical impulses that may feel pleasurable to you at the moment, but could be harmful to you

in the long run. And of course this this is another another area we can imagine it being hacked for you know, on both sides, someone saying, all right, I know this device was just about you know, treating a disorder, but I'm I'm going to tinker with it, and now it gives me orgasms when I push a button. But then the reverse of that, of course, is someone actually

monkeying with your cognitive performance. Yeah, uh yeah. And you can only think as things like this become more complex, there will be more and more opportunities for dangerous exploits as well. You know, basically, the possibility for dangerous exploits seems to track along with the potential for helping the brain. Right as we as we have more power to heal, we have more power to destroy. You see that with any technology, right You see those parallel tracks of the

beneficial applications for humanity and then the negative, self destructive ones. Totally, it's a it's a nuclear power at the neural level. Yeah, it's it's chemistry. You know, the same advancements that gave us all the beneficial applications of chemistry also produced chemical weapons. So, uh so I want to look at one more potential neurotechnology that could have great rewards and great risks. And so this one is going to be cognitive augmentation. So

one commonly discussed example is memory augmentation. This comes with its own benefits and risks. The risks are fairly obvious. If you have the capability to augment memory, you may also have the capability to degrade a race or alter existing memories, or to create false memories or impressions. Uh and and alter the entire integrity of a person's memory system. But I got another idea, what about computational upgrades? Assuming

such a thing as ever possible. We we don't really know if it is, but we'll assume for now that it could be possible to upgrade the brain's ability to say, do math or you or computational reasoning. Okay, just an implant that boosts some sort of cognitive function in your brain at your point being like either you're you're you're handling of mathematics or your memory, etcetera. Yeah, So, Robert, I got a scenario for you. Somebody offers you a free surgery that they say has a chance of increasing

your i Q by twenty five points. Would you take it? Mm hmmm, I don't know that. That's pretty good, Uh, pretty good odds of success. Yeah, you don't have to answer. Now. I got one to make it a little more obvious if you if you're a person out there who's listening, and you'd say, hell, no, you know, I'm not messing around with my brain. I like my brain the way it is. I'm not going to introduce all these risks. Then consider this, What if everybody else around you has

taken this. Yeah, so all of your friends, your co workers, everybody in your professional circle, all of your professional rivals, they all take the upgrade. This is a This is a big issue in trans humanist thought. You know, who gets to be trans human? And what does it mean to say no to some sort of trans human experience such as a you know, a surgical implant that that boost your cognitive ability. Well, I'm just talking about voluntary willingness.

So of course the question of who this is available to is a big question, But it's a different question I'm saying. Let's let's just assume we're in a crazy scenario where it's freely available to everyone, and the only question is do you want it? Will you voluntarily take it? I'm not sure you're you're in the situation where if you're if you're the first person, you'd probably say like, no,

I don't think I want that, it's too weird. If you're the last person, you would probably be desperate to catch up, Right, Would you voluntarily choose to remain at a cognitive deficit to everybody else around you who has upgraded themselves. I mean that's the thing. People are going to take the risk. People are going to be hungry enough to take the risk. Some people are going to

be comfortable enough not to but for how long? Yeah, this is where we get into a scenario of something that I would call maybe this isn't the best term for it, but I'm going to try this out. The term is irresistible availability, and so I'm going to posit that bring computer interfaces and certain types of neural augmentation cognitive augmentation, if they're possible, they are going to fall

into this category of irresistible availability. So I would say, you know, consumer technology that looks scary at first tends to go through several phases. Of course, you've got the lab phase, right, You've got the alpha and beta phase. It's fairly contained, constrained. It's testing with people who are part who are in on the game basically, and then you've got to you've got a release, and you've got early adopters. These are people who are technologically adventurous and

they start using this new thing. They tend to like to show off its advantages. They're more willing to accept risks that are, you know, that haven't been worked out yet. They're willing to get along with the kinks that haven't been solved. Then the intermediate adopters weighed in and at some point a new technology that originally seemed scary weird and unnecessary reaches a tipping point of convenience advantage and widespread adoption. And I would say there's definitely a social

element to this. It's not just the true, you know, financial or time convenience it provides, but it's the fact that everybody else is doing it. And at some point it goes from something that I don't need and that scares me to something I couldn't imagine living without. And you can see this in many in many contexts. You think back to cell phones. How cell phones went from

a like weird and unnecessary thing that extravagance. Yeah, like characters and movies had cell phones, especially in their car. Remember when I still enjoy watching like, you know, eighties films where there's a super villain of some sort in a crappy be movie. Of course they have that big, bulky car phone. You're like, Oh, imagine a world which someone makes a phone call from their car. Do you remember when paying for something online with a credit card

was this really weird, scary and unnecessary thing. I specifically remember that thing, like, why would anybody ever use a credit card to pay for something on the internet. That's insane? Yeah, that's that's what you do. You call an eight hundred number and credit card that way, and then think about maybe mobile banking and transactions, ride sharing apps like Uber and lift. You just think about this progression from scary

and unnecessary to fundamental. It's the progress of irresistible availability. And I very much think that neurotechnology could easily go in the same direction as it because the advantage has become more clear as the risks sort of get blurry and and go out of focus because so many people are using it. Uh, it just starts to look more and more like something that you can't go without. And then once you've tried it, you're in the pool. Yeah.

I mean, I just keep thinking back to flying, like if if if flying makes sense and an airline, then everything makes sense. Yeah. You're clearly defining the will of God by getting in this machine and ascending like a bird. Um. So yeah, everything else is on the table too. Yeah. Man, And they don't even try to make it pleasant anymore, and people still can't stop doing it. Yeah, like they don't have to sugarcoat it. Yeah, you're in a flying

death machine. I'm on board. Well, actually, to speak of death machines, of course, the classic comparison here is the car, the automobile, which is far more potentially deadly than just flying on an airline. Yeah. Imagine cars were new and nobody drove them, and they were just brand new invention, just now being debuted. And they told you, Okay, on average, about thirty three thousand people a year are going to die in these machines in the United States alone. Do

you want one? Yeah, you would, you would say, I don't know. That sounds kind of dangerous. But the thing is we were born into this world. We're born into the world of the automobile, and so you just take it for granted. Yeah, these are the these are this is the roll of the dice we take every day. So of course it's normal. The convenience creeps in, the widespread adoption makes it look normal and okay, and so it's irresistible availability. It's just ubiquitous and you can't get

around it. Yeah, and even things that are not available to everyone just become increasingly normal. Like I keep thinking back to uh too, like Time magazine headlines about test tube babies back in seven nineties. Oh yeah, the like original stigma about IVF. Yeah, and of course that has become It just became increasingly normal, just increasingly every day, like today. It's just another reproductive option that's on the table.

And I mean, I think that was also influenced then by by social social stigma and certainly like misogyny, certain ideas about about you know, people trying to control what women's bodies are for. But yes, there is Yeah, just the technological ask act alone certainly has become more more accepted. Yeah, so it seems undeniable that will see the same thing occur with these various the idea of neural implants. Yeah, and this stuff may becoming a lot sooner than we think.

So we we've talked about how there's already deep brain stimulation and robotic limbs. These are already in development. They already in some cases work pretty well. It's just a question of them being deployed more in the wild and becoming more widely available. But the question of cognitive augmentation, that's still more of a future concern. We haven't really discovered any strong entry ways into that arena of technology yet, but we could be closing that gap really fast, is

what I'm saying. So, how about neural lace elon musk Oh, yeah, the neural lace. I love this idea because of course that the the The guy who coined the term neural lace is sci fi author Ian in Banks, one of

my personal favorites always comes back to the Banks here. Yeah, and in his books, there's the culture which is this uh anarco utopian um far future society, and everybody in the culture has all these transhumanist adaptation such as like drug glands that they can they can gland various substances to change how they're feeling, and they all have this neural lace that enhances cognitive ability and kind of gives them a Basically, they're they're they're tied into a vast

sea of information that they can call up as they need. So basically the idea is it is a way of robustly connecting the brain to the external information systems of the Internet or whatever their future version of the Internet is. Yeah, it would be like Google Brain. Yeah, uh yeah. So that's pretty close to what Musque seems to have in mind. Obviously, we're not there yet, but we do have prototypes of

this sort of technology. It's it's nowhere near uh In in Banks level yet, but in March, Elon Musk was in the news promoting this new neurotext artupp called neural Link, which he basically plans to use as the vanguard of the coming neuro cyborg movement. And the idea of the neural lace is really the short version is it's this ultrafined mesh material that can be injected into the brain

case with the needles. You get the needle inside the skull and you inject this mesh material over the outside of the brain, where it naturally unfurls to cover the outer surface of the cortices, and from here it melds with the brain and can offer supposedly extremely precise electrical feedback and electrical control of brain activity what they would

call a quote direct cortical interface. And supposedly trial versions of this have been deployed in mice with apparently very few side effects, and so in the short term this might prove a useful treatment for various neurological disorders, you know, age associated neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders. But Musk is not shy about the sci fi stuff. He's He's into his other motive, which is that ultimately

he's interested in cognitive upgrades. He wants cognitive augmentation of the human brain. And one of the main reasons he's given publicly is that Musk is one of these people who's concerned about existential risk from artificial intelligence. So we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before.

We I think we talked about it in our Transhumanist Rapture War episodes, but maybe we should do a whole episode or episode series on this sometimes, because I do think the question of the risks posed by artificial intelligence is interesting, and one of the reasons it's interesting is that it's one of these questions where really smart people who really know what they're talking about, are totally on

both sides of the issue. You hear people saying we need to be worrying about existential risk from AI right now, and other smart people are saying these people are lunatics. You this is not a concern. And not sure which side of the the issue I fall on. Yeah, it kind of depends on whose argument I'm reading. I kind of fall in line with with whoever whatever the last rational argument happen on the matter. Yeah, I guess I'm there.

I I consider myself highly persuadable on this topic still, but anyway, Musk is one of these people who says, look, creating superhuman artificial intelligence is a genuine risk to us. We at the very least risk becoming irrelevant, if not risk being destroyed. And so he thinks that in order to avoid becoming irrelevant or worse in the face of superhuman AI, we've got to be willing to upgrade our

brains to keep up with the machines. In other words, the only way to make sure that you don't fall victim to machine intelligence is to merge with it to become Yeah, and in his view, neural lace might be one way to get us there, giving us the power to augment our bio brains with your neurotechnology to become superhuman mind hybrids. So if the if the the AI got is essentially a cat's cradle design, we want to make sure we're the fingers. We want to make sure

we're uh, you know, an important aspect of its spiritual body. Yeah, even if we're not, it's and I mean, we also don't want to be just some irrelevant obstacle to whatever its goals. Are we want to be thoroughly integrated with it and its motives. Yeah, which kind of comes back to n in Banks. That's that that's kind of how he he weaves the humans and the humanoids of the culture into everything, Like they're the minds, the ai s that that ultimately rule everything and are making all the

hard decisions. They see the value and having human operatives, and they also have this is kind of like like hard hard part of their programming, Like I guess they're sort of corporate culture, is that there's something important about human life. Yeah. Now, if you're still one of those people out there saying, Okay, I'm just never going to get any kind of neurological implants that By the way,

I'm not advising people never get neurological implants. I'm more saying that the people designing these things really need to be thinking super hard about security from day one. I guess we're way past day one, but from day whatever. This is right now, But you don't just have to worry about the future of neurological influence from technology if you get an implant. There are other ways to influence the brain with technology. Yeah, yeah, I mean I mentioned

this a little bit earlier. But I think another potential exploit exploitation would be, uh, you know, if you had some manner of external fine tuned electromagnetic cranial stimulation device, perhaps when the aids of the treatment of a psychological condition, or perhaps even works recreationally. Imagine malware or hacking scheme that turns such brain functioning management on its ear. You know, how fast would you be able to rip the thing off? And oh, I can't use it uh in anymore? You know,

I'm gonna have to go a day. I'm gonna have to bring this thing into the shop. How am I going to get across down without my uh my, my god helmet to get me there? Now, these external devices I think are a little less plausible on this account than implanted devices are because they're less precise. Right, So you've got transcranial electrical stimulation, also transcranial magnetic stimulation, these things that you know, yeah, play electromagnetic force to the

outside of the head. Uh. When I've seen experiments with these types of things so far, the results they're able to induce in the brain are very very blunt and broad, if you know what I mean. They're not nearly the kinds of minute targeted results that you would get by implanting electrical devices inside the skull or inside the brain. Still, if it keeps me from from auditing my body theting's appropriately, then it's gonna ruin my week. Yeah. So so on one hand, I do think this is a real concern.

And I should also mention that one of the other papers we looked at was a paper by Saldi Costa, Dale R. Stevens, and Jeremy A. Hansen in UH from the International Conference on Human Aspects of Information Security, Privacy and Trust from and essentially what they look at is trying to create a broad architecture for an intrusion prevention

system for brain computer interfaces. That's kind of a hard thing to design at this point, because you know, you don't know exactly what all these systems are gonna look like.

But the basic system they come up with is that, you know, you'd you'd have a two tiered security system where any UH in Internet or external input coming into the brain has to go through what's known as an intrusion prevention system, which is just a system that tries to screen traffic passing into a network or a machine, and if traffic looks suspicious, it says, sorry, you can't go in, And then you'd have to pair that with And I love this sort of the brain equivalent of

an anti virus program. Anti virus program looks at what code is executing on this computer right now, what what executive functions are happening, and if it sees suspicious activity,

it shuts it down. The brain version would have to use some kind of signal processing to look at what's happening in the brain, or in the or in the neural device and say, does any of this looks suspicious, like something the brain wouldn't normally be doing, and if so, you might have to disconnect the neural device or shut

it down. Yeah, and this is an area where I can just imagine this kind of instead of going just full fledged face forward into a thought police scenario, we're kind of backing into one, because you end up with a situation where potentially where you have we're human cognition.

Is this byproduct of organic and machine right become increasingly cyborg it's it becomes and then therefore any kind of intrusive thoughts or even criminal thoughts, it becomes kind of like bad behavior in a dog, right, not a wild dog, but a pet animal because whatever, what always happens, Like people are saying, oh, well is this because the is this?

The owner's thought is that the dog's fault. And it is there any way to really distinguish between all of these things because the condition of the dog is so manipulated and so changed by its relationship with humans. Yeah,

that's a very good point. I mean, I can see a scenario where in the future people might have say, you've got a deep brain stimulator in your head, or you've just got neural lace or something like that, some kind of neuroperipheral technology that changes the way your brain works, and then you do something that you say that didn't seem like me. Did the neuroprosthetic make me do it. Let's say I went and robbed a bank. Could I sue the company that made my neuroprosthetics and say this

is totally out of character for me. I don't know why I did that. I never would have robbed a bank normally, And I think what happened is that my neuroprosthetic malfunctioned and it artificially pumped up my aggressiveness and lowered my inhibitions and did all this stuff that temporary really turned me into a bank robber, and that's not

my biological brain's fault. Or it could be that you went to the wrong website, you clicked on something you you shouldn't have, and that somehow that managed to like follow up the chain to your brain itself and alter your behavior. Oh, I didn't even think about that with neuroprosthetics. So it could be something you click on on the Internet, or some search you do on Amazon can now not only follow you around it showing you ads at different websites,

but it can follow you into your brain. Or maybe they didn't even hack you, say they hacked an advertisement that you passed, and that advertisement communicates with devices that you have that you know, so that it can you can figure out what your behavior is and you know, feed you the right advertisements, maybe in your dreams or something.

Yeah uh yeah. So the main thing, my main point in this episode is that I think that we cannot depend on the consumers opting out as a way to avoid these risks because of this this irresistible availability thing. As these things become more available, become more widespread, and become more useful. People are just not going to be

able to resist the urge to use them. And uh and in some cases there you know, if you suffer like an injury or a disability or something, there's no reason you you you should want to resist them, right, They will give you lost functionality back. I mean, unless there's an end to the advancement technology or say there's a buttle arian jahad and and people as as you know in mass decide no, we we you know, we're

not going to cross this point. We're gonna put in place laws that keep us from augmenting ourselves and becoming and thinking like machines. Yeah. So I'm saying you can't depend on the individual consumer or patient to opt out. That that is not something that should be part of the thinking on this. It should be that security concerns are absolutely take can into consideration from day whatever this is now, because it's never from day one, it's always going to be like day you gotta you gotta be

ahead of those brain hackers. Yeah, all right, so there you have it. Hopefully we gave everyone some you know ace, you know, definitely some some room for a little paranoia and a little sci fi wondering, for sure, but also just some some some real facts about technology and security and how the how the the footfalls tend to go in this trek, and one hopes those footfalls are chosen

by one's own free will. Yes indeed so hey. If you want to uh learn more about this topic, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all of our podcast episodes, blog posts, links out to our various social media accounts such as face but Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We're on all those things, and the landing page for this episode will include some links out to the some of the sources we talked

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