The US government is researching technology that it hopes will turn soldiers into cyborgs, allowing them to connect directly to computers. Researchers from DARPA hope to develop a high-bandwidth, implantable neural interface to open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics, thanks to programme called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD). http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/us-military-cyborg-connecting-humans-computers
I generally strictly avoid commenting on such topics, but this is ....Chilling. Most of us have a strong hunch where this is all heading - eventual replacement of resource hungry humanity with 'clean, green' AI - along the lines of the 2001 movie AI. No doubt with lesser AI strictly governed by an AI elite. No-one knows if that will be a heaven or a hell scenario, but the impetus is undeniable. Except by gradualist soft-sell merchants whose job it is to smoothly pave the way by ensuring minimal resistance - until it's too late to reverse.
The technology is just too powerful to be denied. It's coming. So we need to prepare for it. Once we link our brains, and in some respects we already have, we need to be concerned about the possibility that our brains could be hacked.
You mean totally hacked? Courtesy of NSA and pals, lot's of full-spectrum hacking/surveillance already a fact of life. With dubious justification. But I digress.
Not really imo. To date, those in the know (Snowden & pals) tell us every cell-phone/fixed-line call, every email, most webpage visits, are intercepted and stored away in vast data banks. And if certain key-words/phrases are used, or certain sites visited, one expects automatic placement on a 'watch-list'. The discretion being up to faceless folks who hide behind the curtain. It can be argued it's all for the public good, yet who can challenge the criteria when it's not divulged except via bland and vague platitudes? Enough of the pseudo politics. Back on topic. For every measure there's a countermeasure. Lore has it the USSR fell largely due to trying to keep pace with the Reagen-era 'Star Wars' program. Yet it was well publicized and known back then that it would be far easier and cheaper to overwhelm any hugely expensive 'Star Wars' deployment by simply ramping up the number of ICBM's and associated decoys. So what's the bet implant comms won't be vulnerable to say relatively cheap RF jamming, virus attacks etc? In the medium term at least, the huge beneficiaries are the defense contractors living off government i.e. tax-payer largess.
This news story appears to be a journalistic reaction to this appearing on DARPA's website: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-01-19 In order to make this work, neuroscience will have to learn a lot more than it currently knows about how information is encoded in neural networks as complicated as the human brain. Then there will have to be the mother of all modems, translating digital data into whatever it is that neuroscience eventually discovers. I'm seriously skeptical and don't anticipate human beings with usb ports in their heads in my lifetime. It sounds like people in Washington are paying too much attention to the exceedingly trendy 'futurist' 'post-humanism' nuts. They are going to have enough trouble with controlling and extracting 'sense' data from prosthetic limbs. Implementing vision for blind people by stimulating the brain's visual cortex is still very much a work in progress and is still crude in the extreme. (Dots can be generated in the visual field, but not detailed visual scenes.) Doing what little they can do in terms of visual interfaces already requires major surgical implantation of electrode arrays in the brain. I don't anticipate the ability to download memory or skill-set files into people, or any kind of mind to mind digital telepathy, in the forseeable future.
There's nothing wrong with healthy skepticism. But neural science is advancing at breakneck speed. In 2014 the on/off switch to human consciousness was discovered. We now have the ability to turn people on and off like a light switch. Imagine the possibilities. For years now DARPA has worked on machines which can read human thoughts.
Are you perhaps referring to the following ? - : http://www.rifters.com/real/article...trical-stimulation-disrupts-consciousness.pdf
I much prefer the singular cyborg rather than the computer which must be PROGRAMED BY the human i.e. told what to do. Computers should choose their own code... On another thought is a mistake regarded as a part of action? If a computer calculates wrongly is this not also a choice??
WWII resulted in the deaths of 50 million people. That was an ocean of grief that continues to move through the planet to this day. Seems there should be a couple hundred years of relative peace on Earth, where we can benefit from the sacrifices that were made. At the same time, we should be re-engineering the flawed structures that brought us to that time in history just out of respect for those that did the sacrificing. I think people should begin with the architecture of living and working spaces. No more rectangular close quarters living and working areas in the world. Minimum one acre per family or business should be the norm, probably arranged in concentric circles, and taking into account environmental requirements intrinsic to the locale, like building partially underground, or into the side of a mountain. Everyone should have a moment of joy and happiness at least once a day - normally. Who will pay for it? It will come directly out of the pockets of the billionaires that to date refuse to get seriously involved with their civilization. They don't deserve what they have - so take it away from them, and redistribute it to the highly educated people and re-designed institutions that can make the best use of the available resources. Who is capable of that level of engineering? The civilization has enough educated people. They are just working on projects that benefit the status quo.
