57R34M #286

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As neural engineering becomes more complex and more widespread, the potential for security breaches will mushroom.

For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb.

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In some cases, patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.

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“ Dubai continues to fling huge and strange structures into the sky, but there’s no future there. Megastructures have become medieval. Which seems obvious, but there’s still this apparently inescapable urge to look at things like the great clunking space shuttle – which its drivers call the Flying Brick, and whose emergency escape procedure is actually just “sit there and die” – and call it The Future, and mourn its passing as a mark of how our path to the future seems to be getting blocked by landfill and rotting piles of the Daily Telegraph. ”

“ Punk was fun, but No Future isn’t interesting. You can’t deny the future. My favourite line from the fine piece of postmodernism that is DEADWOOD is “You do not fuck the future, sir. The future fucks you.” No Future is fear of the future, inability to cope with the future, the inability to desire — desire was a key postpunk word, as in the politics of desire, the philosophy of desire — and is ultimately fuckless. And no-one wants a fuckless future. ”