Mari’s comment the other day, about extended embedded interaction technology to other senses, leads to a very good point. The more we build our interaction technologies into our own bodies, the more vulnerable we become to perception hacking.
It’s one thing if a computer screen is hacked, since the damage is localized. You might not be seeing a true representation of networked information, but the misinformation does not become conflated with the world around you. Once somebody else can hack into channels of perception that you use to see reality itself, the results can be far more damaging.
If you have technology that lets your eyes see things that aren’t there, or your ears hear things that don’t exist, or your fingers touch objects that are not real, you become open to the possibility that malicious software will be able to send false information through your enhanced senses, giving you a false impression of the reality around you.
And so an entirely new field might arise — a field of security that protects you from having your augmented reality replaced by a chimera. If you get used to seeing ambiscopic signs to give you directions, or to verifying the identities of people by looking at the information you see floating above their heads, you become vulnerable to this sort of hacking.
I don’t have any solution to this problem, since there is never a simple solution to the abuse of any new technology. But this is an issue that we will need to keep in mind, as we continue to augment the interface between brain and sensed reality.
You wrote exactly my fear and you really should stop writing this out as BAD people will take hints!! 🙂
With advances come evil people who use them… I could play a high B (1000hz) for example and launch a bomb…
Alas, those bad people don’t need any help from me. Any technology can be used for either good or evil. The same pen can be used to write either a peace treaty or a hate speech.