robotScientists, psychs, engineers, medicos and others are hacking the brain to control movement.  So what’s wrong with that? Let’s start with hacking in the general sense.

If you have an electronic system in your home or car, you are vulnerable to hacking. As the Federal Trade Commission’s then-Chief Technologist Steven Bellovin told me a few years ago, “The odds on anyone … finding a magic solution to the computer security problems are exactly zero. Most of the problems we have are due to buggy code, and there’s no single cause or solution to that.”

And as evidence, in recent months we saw 10 million driver licenses exposed to hackers along with untold data in the Equifax hack , 14 million Verizon customer records   Wannacry ransomware, and on and on.

Stealing data and records, erasing bad grades, swiping credit card numbers and so on cost millions of dollars in damages every year and waste everyone’s time and money guarding against them.

But there’s more to hacking than just grabbing bits and bytes. Stuxnet destroyed uranium centrifuges in Iran,  and a few years ago, in a DHS experiment, a computer hack blew up a large industrial generator.

So just how secure do you think self-driving cars will be, let alone electronic brain implants?

Let’s say in five years, a few thousand people have some remote-control brain implant. Does anyone think those wouldn’t be of interest to hackers, political parties, the Russians, the North Koreans? Our own CIA or FBI? The horror of The Manchurian Candidate – of someone taking over the mind of someone else – was once science fiction, but now the technology is under development to create an actual Manchurian-Candidate remote-control human being.

There may be some actual medical value to electronic brain implants, but when you read about some wonderful new advance using them, think about where the technology came from — the MKULTRA mind control program —  and where it could lead — electroceuticals and electronic brain implants — in an age of rapidly advancing technology and Stone-Age politicians.