Long Nguyen
The article I recently read, “Could hackers ‘brainjack’ your memories in future?”, got me thinking about the increasingly important role of cyber security as our society continues to advance technologically. The article talks about how advancement in the field of neurotechnology will soon allow us to have brain implants that can treat diseases, enhance memories, and even manipulate memories in the future. Despite these benefits, the consequences can be grave if the control of this technology falls into the wrong hands. With more and more medical devices being connected via the Internet, hospital networks, and smartphones, the risk of exploitation of cyber-security vulnerabilities increases.
I relates the content of this article back to the concept of system thinking that we learned in class. To effectively solve this complex problem, we need to take a step back and take a bigger picture look at how the cyber security system interacts with other constituents of the system. In traditional analysis thinking, it is easy to say that encryption, identity and access management, patching and updating the security of medical devices will solve the cyber security question. However, in system thinking, it is also important to educate clinicians and patients, other constituents in the system, on how to take precautions as well. In my opinion, system thinking will allow us to develop a great cyber security system in the first generation of implants, which will provide a great foundation for the future generations of implants moving forward.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47277340.
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.
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.