This morning, I read an article about how brain scanning technology is causing Colorado and Minnesota to propose legislation that is aimed at establishing rights and protections for information collected from our thoughts through the neural signals that can be scanned and collected from our brains. Kudos to these states, and others, as these kinds of protections are being considered.
As a husband, father, friend, employee, and citizen of a crazy world that is looking more and more like a cross between Alice's Wonderland and Stalin's Russia by the day, this really concerns me: sometimes the greatest thing we can do is control our mouths to keep us from speaking what is going through our minds!
But in this era of the politicization of everything, when people seem so eager to use force to compel—instead of reason to persuade—others to think as they feel they must, what happens when we no longer have the ability to use our mouths (or, fingers on keyboards) as the final safety restraint to keep our thoughts and ideas from getting us into trouble? What happens when those with the power can read our thoughts before we could even speak them? With our thoughts and ideas being the greatest form of privacy, the very essence of humanity, where does this leave humanity?
You think this is too far-fetched to be bothered with? Just a few weeks ago, we saw a pretty big step in this direction when the first human received the Neuralink brain chip implant that allows them to control their phone or other devices with only their mind. As astonishing as this may seem, if technology teaches us anything, it is that it will advance. It is not too hard to imagine that one day, what must be done now with a chip may be able to be replicated by mere scanning alone.
Speaking of far-fetched, what happens when the devices that are used to read are instead used to control—or, heaven forbid, are hacked? As you will see from the article below that I wrote 12 years ago, what may seem far-fetched now may very well become commonplace at some point in the future.
Back in early 2012, I wrote a blog post about whether hacking a human would violate the U.S. federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Shortly after publishing it, I received a call from a guy in Austin who said, "Dude, someone finally gets it, I need your help!" I responded that I was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist, and that I was just kidding when I wrote that... kinda.
Now, here we are six years later and it seems this is becoming more and more of a thing. What do you think?
This article was published originally here.
