The experts: even the brain will soon have to be protected from hackers
Unusual electronics implanted in the brain may very soon become commonplace. Implants, predict futurologists, will provide the central organ of the nervous system with additional "powers" and will help to significantly expand a person's thinking abilities. In addition, by sending impulses directly to the central nervous system, it will be possible to treat a variety of diseases.
Bioelectronics, in particular, has recently taken an interest in Google: on August 1, it launched a new company that aims to develop miniature electrical implants by 2023. Organic electronics will allow chronic diseases such as arthritis, diabetes and asthma to be treated by stimulating specific parts of the body.
The future is closer than it seems: there are already biosensors that register brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) and allow limb movement just by thinking about it. How a person controls an artificial hand with the power of thought can be seen in this video:
At the same time, brain-computer interfaces are fraught with great danger, creating a threat of "hacking" the brain. The fact is that scientists have not yet figured out how to give computers access only to those brain waves that they need, and weed out the rest.
Electrical engineer Howard Cizek of the Biorobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington, for example, admits a scenario that in the not too distant future cybercriminals will be able to get right into the human mind. “In fact, there is very little time left. If we do not solve this problem quickly, then it will be too late,”he said.
According to his colleague Tamara Bonachi, now computers receive not just any separate, but all the EEG signals sent by the brain, "which contain valuable information about us as people." If protection is not invented in time, not only hackers, but also the police and governments will be able to abuse this unusual "thought detector" Now electrical engineers are developing a "BCI-anonymizer" for filtering EEG signals, but its effectiveness has not yet been proven.