Where I end and you begin
inevitably moral questions will be raised on where the humanity ends, and the machinery begins. At what point are we considered robot? By biosocial definition, humans with pacemakers are cyborgs, and theoretically this could be expanded to those with hearing aids, contact or intraocular lenses, and even (at a stretch), those of us with smartphones. Neuralink is engineering systems where we can control computer systems with our minds: to eventually reach a goal of being able to control input devices, like a mouse and keyboard, with thought alone. Where it evidently brings the advantages of implausible accuracy, in scenarios like surgery, that the human hand could never deliver, it brings changes and impacts to our futures that we should be wary of. The advent of these new interfaces that become a physical part of us will change who we are: ‘cyborg’ is already an amalgam of two words, ‘cybernetic organism’. Becoming a cyborg, you are now neither purely organic nor purely cybernetic. Will we struggle to define our thoughts in a similar way? If you solve a maths problem, who is to know whether that was your own human ingenuity or rather your machine cognitive enhancement. Where do our ideas originate? Under the umbrella of ‘fighting common anxiety and depression disorders’, Neuralink will be able to emit waves, outs ide of natural frequency, to alter the host’s emotions. If your cognitive implant can alter how quickly you get stressed, decrease your paranoia, reduce your anger, and change how you react to stimuli, how much of your original personality is left? Without strong delineation between your organic self and technological self, you may never be able to tell which action was prompted by your own human emotion, or whether it was governed by code. Perhaps more important is the divide this could cause between societies. The price of a Neuralink implant is forecasted to be $3,000 - $5,000. Not everyone has got $5,000 lying around to test out a novel technology: we could see the advance of this new technology widen the ever-expanding economic stratification of global society. Is a lack of autonomy another factor Neuralink brings with it, as its heavy, cybernetic emotional baggage? If they do become widely available, those competing with the cyborgs of the future may have to take up the implant just to remain relevant in our future society. Or if it ’ s not a case of economic value, what about social value? Could we see people isolated from social circles because they don’t have the newest brain chip? That’s even if it gets safely onto the open market. God forbid it reac hes customers’ hippocampus before being rigorously tested: could we see cyberattacks on our own brains? Around 65,000 attempts to hack small-to-medium-sized businesses occur in the UK every day, around 4,500 of which are successful. Attacking where all your most important personal records are stored, your memories, would increase the value of cyberattacks exponentially. Would these systems be strong enough to protect the most valuable part of our body? The most common cyberattack is ‘ransomware’. The most infamous, the aptly named programme ‘WannaCry’, affected hundreds of thousands of computers in over 150 countries worldwide in May 2017. This technology was in fact stolen from the US National Security Agency by a group of hackers. Ransomware is spread from computer to computer, encrypting files and making them inaccessible. The only way to regain access to your precious files is to pay a fee. Could hackers infiltrate our brains and corrupt our knowledge, or our memories, demanding a ransom for their return? Brainwashing and mind control may no longer be confined to the boundaries of science-fiction, but could be seen on our news headlines.
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