Long Duc Nguyen

This is a very interesting and scary idea. Of course the security issue is the most scary since someone could actually hack into something in your brain and possibly control the way you think with these implants. However, using the concept of systems thinking and thinking about the system that these implants are a part of, there are also other things at play here that scare me.

I’m not really sure I would want to have people be able to alter their memories in the future and think something happened when it really didn’t. I also wouldn’t use this technology myself because the memory is fabricated and defeats the purpose of it being a “memory” in reality it isn’t really a memory it’s something you wish happened. I think experiences and the way things happen naturally, make you who you are as a person and help you grow, and I think fabricating that could effect it. For example, people probably wouldn’t want any bad memories, so they would alter them to make them more pleasant; however, the memory being bad probably taught them a valuable lesson. It’s not good for people to be thinking everything always works out perfectly or the way they want it to, but if they are able to alter their memories this may happen and eventually put people in danger. These implants could potentially affect the way you think and also change who you are.

This is a pretty terrifying thought, although a very interesting article and you did a great job of relating it back to the course. I remember seeing in a fictional TV show that someone hacked the heart device of a man to cause him to have a heart attack, and we are getting to a point with technology where these sorts of things are become really possible. You hit the nail on the head when mentioning how the systems thinking needs to be applied. Just updating/securing the technology isn’t enough, because social engineering is the easiest and cheapest way to access a system, no matter how protected it may be.

I agreed wholeheartedly that a metric should be as interactive and actionable as possible, I am also familiar with “vanity metrics”, which are common in the marketing agency world.
However, I am ambivalent about whether all “good metrics” are necessarily actionable. I am thinking about cases where some measurements are static and stable, having to do with the infrastructure of the system; you cannot quickly alter them and see changes, but they are crucial to maintaining the health of the system. Sometimes, analysts may work with a dashboard of key KPIs, but deep/ad-hoc analyses may require getting quick access to boring metrics recorded in the background.

Also, thank you for talking about that report on MIT Sloan and Google.