Do you want to be Transhuman?

As I mentioned, if this is as simple as you say it is, then prove it by giving me an example of hackers forcing people with cochlear implants to listen to Friday on loop.

Or hijack modems so that it always writes troll post on this forum here.

Or hijack webcams so that no matter what people is trying to get it to record it it always record videos that get people arrested.

Thing is if you want to worry about hacking for bionic implants that you've got to worry about hacking for similar computer devices that we have today and you are using right now. As far as I know no one here worried about their webcams being hacked to make porn, or modems being hacked to write posts on forums by themselves.

And that is assuming that the implants have an IC and have programs in the first place. For example, the tCDS is pretty much electrodes stuck on your head connected to a power supply (but that is more for enhancing brain power rather than a sensory imput).

edited 20th Aug '14 6:34:03 AM by IraTheSquire

I think a lot of people's fear comes from watching appalling movies in which TEH L 33 T HACKORZ can hack their enemies' waffle maker and force it to burn threatening messages into their waffles.

"Who needs a network connection, if it's higher technology than a pencil it probably can be "hacked" by some malevolent person and forced to do whatever that baddie wants."

This is what happens when movies depict people "hacking into" gas lines to make them explode.

Next they'll be hacking into cake mix to make it burn in the oven or, worse, fail to rise.

Personally, I rather doubt that there would be any need for prosthetic implants to be wired up to a network connection in such a way that they can be controlled remotely.

A) Where would the benefit be in being able to remotely access parts of your body by internet link? Were you planning on spending time outside of yourself?

B) Why would serious medical regulatory boards permit the manufacture and installation of prosthetics that could be accessed by persons unknown?

Basically, the only thing a prosthetic eye or cochilear implant has to "network" with, is the brain of the body it's installed in.

And no amount of magical hacking is going to get it to accept input from a computer via wifi/bluetooth if it hasn't got the capability to receive such information.

I was thinking more Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, myself...

Hollywood Hacking is one of tropes listed under Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex.

Thing is, even assuming that bionic devices are connected to an external network, they are still electronic/computer devices no different from a modem or your computer. If you're worried about hacking bionic device you'll have to worry about your computer getting hacking right now and do those similar things (getting your webcam to record things that doesn't exist; getting your DVD drive to read things from your DVD that is not there; getting your modem to send messages through the phone that you did not tell it to send; etc). The fact that no one here seem to have heard the latter happening suggest to me that it is not as trivial or as easy as one would expect.

And if you are still worried, well, why are you still here? Aren't you worried that your modem has been compromised and it is going to write a post on this forum that will put you on the terrorist watch list?

edited 20th Aug '14 5:17:40 PM by IraTheSquire

Well I dunno about fake images, but it's actually really easy to mess with people's minds if you can directly stimulate their brain. I mean, you can't make someone a drone with just an electric wire (well, an addict, sure, but...) , but you can do a surprising amount with pretty simple stuff.

edited 20th Aug '14 8:02:18 PM by CassidyTheDevil

But the only things directly stimulating the brain would be the prosthetic implants, and then only the areas concerned with the senses they are replacing - sound, sight, touch etc.

No amount of hacking is going to get the device to rewire itself within your brain, no matter what the Die Hard scriptmonkeys say.

Basically, the only way that someone's going to turn you into a Nivenesque "Wirehead" is by breaking into your home, operating on your brain while you sleep and jamming a live wire into your limbic system.

Cochilear implants and prosthetic eyes are not going to be wired in with an auxiliary wire connected to the "rivers of reward" sector of your brain and a "Redirect power to rivers of reward? Y/N" chunk of code built in with a convenient wifi access point protected only by the password "swordfish".

Proof, please. Examples?

How much control can you have over a person using colurs or sounds or touch right now? Because to the brain the signals coming from your organic sensors are no different to those from bionic ones. Whatever you can do with a person by giving them external stimulus is how far you can go with hacking a bionic device.

Also, note that all sensory information to the brain has to go through the thalamus which acts as a filter. There is a good reason why, for example, you forget that you're wearing clothes once you put them on. It is the reason why you get used to certain sensations.

The only exception to the rule is pain, which has its own sensory neurons and is completely unrelated to other neurons, so you'll have to connect to that in order to tap into it (though why the hell would you do that? It's PAIN for crying out loud).

edited 20th Aug '14 11:16:40 PM by IraTheSquire

I'm all for hooking up the cybernetic body's damage detectors to the neurons for "mildly annoying itch" - enough to let you know you've damaged something but not so bad that you can't ignore it - so if you do something silly like step out in front of a car and mangle one of the legs you won't be writhing on the ground in agony and you can just hop down to the repair shop...

No, a brain implant is physically in your brain. For it to do something as complex as provide a convincing virtual reality, it would have to be distributed over basically the entire brain, with extremely high bandwidth two-way communication and sophisticated real-time monitoring of your neural activity.

It's ridiculous to think we have some of small isolated brain region that our entire experiential world lies in. Even for just sight and hearing, it's only partly localized.

And even if your implant did only interact with a small part of your brain, that doesn't mean it would be incapable of doing damage if it were hacked. After all, even a small number of normal pathological neurons can do considerable damage, let alone an electrical device in your brain.

A short answer. Yes.

The moment you connect a cochlear implant to the internet or had it taking input from anything that did, I'd give it just a few days. That's about how long it took when we connected coffee machines (which btw served as a backdoor to entire company networks to boot). Or WeMo Home Automation, which lets a hacker fuck up anything plugged into the outlet, smart device or not, by just strobing the power supply.

You don't get to say "this will never be a credible threat because it hasn't been yet" when talking about a key feature that's never been added to it before — and certainly not when that feature has been added to other things with entirely predictable results.

Better yet, hijack a whole bunch of machines all at once and get them all to troll post. That's definitely never happened before at all. Certainly not as early on as 2001, such as one guy making a botnet so big it accounted for over a quarter of all spam on the internet. Nope. Pure fantasy. And definitely never happened multiple times.

Oh, and if you want to be pedantic and specify modems themselves and not the stuff they connect to, don't worry — that's never happened before either.

Webcams get hijacked all the time. Splicing footage is more dependent on the hijacker's ability to splice images in real time, not access. And if you're already talking about an implant whose entire purpose is to overlay the senses with additional data in a way that a person could usefully interpret, that function doesn't seem too far out there by comparison.

edited 20th Sep '14 8:33:38 PM by Pykrete

First of all, no one here is advocating a "virtual reality". That's quite escapist.

Secondly, the discussion have been on bionic eyes and ears and other body parts. None of those things, as shown by the cochlear implants, require a brain implant that intensively interact with the brain itself.

@ Pykrete: I've already given it to you that security is a concern when internet's involved, though current pacemakers do already have online capability and people are starting to talk about security.

I'm talking about the case where the implant is not connected to the internet (the examples I made are meant to show devices being hacked from the get-go when you first connect them online, ie compromised drivers). Cochlear implants is a good proof that hacking becomes much harder without online capability. It's been out for 20 years and we still haven't got a case of something going wrong because of hacking.

Edit: though

That's what I'm talking about. If you want to give hallucinations to people via hacking their bionic sensors not only you need access but you also need to be able to splice images/sounds in real time. Which is why I think sudden failures of the said implants (like bionic eyes going blind) is more likely.

edited 21st Sep '14 12:11:54 AM by IraTheSquire

@Ira: No, as a matter of fact we were NOT talking about cochlear implants. We were talking about hypotheical Ghost in the Shell-style inplants and you used modern cochlear implants as an analogy.

"Hollywood Hacking is one of tropes listed under Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Thing is, even assuming that bionic devices are connected to an external network, they are still electronic/computer devices no different from a modem or your computer. If you're worried about hacking bionic device you'll have to worry about your computer getting hacking right now and do those similar things (getting your webcam to record things that doesn't exist; getting your DVD drive to read things from your DVD that is not there; getting your modem to send messages through the phone that you did not tell it to send; etc). The fact that no one here seem to have heard the latter happening suggest to me that it is not as trivial or as easy as one would expect. And if you are still worried, well, why are you still here? Aren't you worried that your modem has been compromised and it is going to write a post on this forum that will put you on the terrorist watch list?"

And please don't make this into a goalpost shifting argument, or god forbid a "I meant this!" "No you didn't" argument. It's pretty darn clear that's not what you were talking about at all. (Just saying. I can understand not remembering the conversion.)

People have their phones and computers hacked all the time. It's not easy but certainly is far from inconceivable.

There is are rather large difference between having you computer compromised and having personal theoretical neurological implants hacked which I don't think you are appreciating.

You made a comment about Ghost in the Shell having "Hollywood Hacking". I assumed, apparently wrongly, that you were actually talking about Ghost in the Shell, which explicitly has cybernetic brain implants connected to the internet, and not just "bionic eyes".

Then you claimed the whole conversion was supposedly exclusively about bionic body parts ("Secondly, the discussion have been on bionic eyes and ears and other body parts...") which is not only blatantly untrue, robotic body parts were only mentioned in passing in the first place.

I'm not too sure what people are arguing about but while 'body hacking' certainly seems pretty silly it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

remember Barnaby Jack, the legendary black hat hacker who died shortly after showing how pace makers and insulin pumps could be hacked

How's questioning someone's debating techniques a change from topic to the person?

Anyway:

First of all your own very words:

Secondly: Before the thread got necroed we have been talking about bionic sensors (hell, I even had an extensive debate about whether prosthetics count as a tool or not) and not hooking the brain itself to the internet directly. Somebody mentioned Ghost in a Shell and I replied. That's all I will say.

Well, as I mentioned before people are talking about this people are starting to talk about network security for implants that are online.

It's just that before people making a fuss about prosthetics getting hacked into giving you believable hallucinations while having no online capability which is completely stupid.

edited 22nd Sep '14 11:13:08 PM by IraTheSquire

I was never entirely clear on what the dividing line between "human" and "transhuman" is supposed to be. We already integrate technology into our bodies — from the simplest and most obvious examples of things like glasses and contacts, down to more involved things like pacemakers and cochlear implants. The fact that we can take people with cardiac issues or major hearing loss and effectively mitigate those problems by implanting electronics inside their bodies sounds pretty goddamn transhuman to me — but no one seems to think that such things are eating your soul or anything.

The whole Cybernetics Will Eat Your Soul thing is what I least liked about Cyberpunk 2013/2020 games on the grounds that in Real Life having a prosthetic arm/leg or pacemaker doesn't diminish your "humanity" or make you more inclined to go off the rails and start murdering the Puny Flesh Bags around you.

Even increasing sophistication of prosthetics to the point that they offer feedback wouldn't do it. All it would do is better enable the recipient to function as they could prior to the loss.

The idea behind that, of course, is that there's some intangible property that makes a warm fleshbag "human" and said property is diminished when the fleshy parts get replaced with metal and plastic parts. It's a bit of Science Is Bad and a bit of Beware the Superman — after all, if a cybernetic or bionic person is demonstrably stronger, faster, and/or more durable than a normal person, then why wouldn't everybody replace as much of themselves as they could afford? And why wouldn't those enhanced humans properly look at their less-able "natural" brethren with pity and even scorn?

While I don't buy Cybernetics Will Eat Your Soul as a fundamental premise, I do wonder what will happen to our brains when we inevitably start enhancing them directly with computer chips and stuff like that. Evolution moves way too slowly to keep pace with technology, and we're already having a hard enough time dealing with things like smartphones. Will people go mad because of the wires in their heads?

edited 24th Sep '14 6:41:08 AM by Fighteer

That's sort of like asking if people will go mad because they have smartphones. Evolution didn't design human beings to have that much information and communication at their fingertips, you know? You'd expect someone to Go Mad from the Revelation by that logic.

Yeah, but when we tamper directly with the grey matter, the outcome isn't as easily predictable. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but it's not at the point where I'm jumping up and down saying, "Yes, let me line up to get chips implanted in my head."

That said, we do already have things like that — crude though they may be — to control diseases like severe epilepsy.

edited 24th Sep '14 1:28:28 PM by Fighteer

Oh, sure, we're nowhere near that point yet, but what I'm saying is that by the time we are near that point, I think the idea won't be nearly as controversial as it is now. When people envision transhumanism, they seem to think of it as an all-at-once thing, like we're going to go from bog-standard biologically pure humanity 1.0 to brains in jars controlling weapons-grade cyborg clone bodies overnight. Ghost In The Shell (in the Stand Alone Complex continuity, anyway), for example, has Motoko (as a child) be one of the first people to receive a full-body replacement, and by the show's present day (maybe twenty years later?) it's utterly commonplace, to the point where people are doing it just to have cool cyber-bodies (rather than because they suffered from crippling injuries or illnesses, like Kusinagi did). That's ridiculously fast, and if things did actually happen that quickly, then some form of pushback (eg, the believe that Cybernetics Eat Your Soul and so cyborgs Aren't Really People) would be virtually inevitable.

But I don't think it'll happen that way (if it ever happens at all, that is — no guarantee of that). I think it will be a much slower, more gradual process — like almost every society-changing technological advancement.

Unless something unexpected happens which can push that much faster than normal (say, certain pathogens threaten the existence of mankind. You either get an upgrade or you die).