[extropy-chat] Warwick: Could future computer viruses infecth umans?

[nsjacobus at yahoo.com]

You're absolutely right. I should have abandoned the "neuro/neural" 
moniker. My bad. I was being lazy with terms.

Now, wrt what you could do with my "interface", there's a whole host of 
things you could do with it. You could write "programs" for the 
interface that could be used to control/manipulate muscle development, 
pain management, etc.

I disagree with your assessment/characterization of viruses. A virus 
exploits OS features by employing a suitably crafted payload, or "egg". 
In fact cross-platform viruses have been around for a while. Why don't 
we see more of them? Well, it's much harder to write virus-generators 
for such multi-platform viruses (which is where the bulk of viruses 
come from nowadays). Furthermore, the notion that a virus carry it's 
own tools for recompiling itself, etc. is a standard technique of 
modern metamorphic viruses which use built-in metamorphic-engines to 
change their own signatures so as to avoid detection.

-NJ

On Nov 17, 2004, at 1:09 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote:

--- nsjacobus at yahoo.com wrote:
> What I was suggesting was a completely general
> neuro-biological
> interface that is capable of interacting in both
> directions.

"Neuro-biological" technically refers to the existing
interface we already have, with no electronic (or
similar) components.  (Sorry, but there are rules for
combining terms like that, including that you list
everything you're referring to.  Even if there
weren't, "neurobiology" is a well established
scientific field, and thus has prior claim to that
term.)

> I'm not
> suggesting simply an interface that is used to
> control a PC with your
> thoughts (we can already do that). I'm taking about
> a general interface
> that allows the body to interact with an external
> computing system.

> What I'm getting at here is not simply a way to hook
> up a brain/mind to
> a computer. I'm talking about interfacing the
> biological system to the
> digital system.

I thought we were discussing what Warwick and almost
everybody else means by a "neural interface".  What
you describe seems at first glance to be of little
use, except specifically to enable remote control of
biological systems (and remote controlling another
human being, in the modern sense of the term, borders
on slavery).  True, that particular system could allow
computer code to create biological viruses (by
design) - but why would anyone use such a thing
(again, unless they were being made into virtual
slaves)?

There is an exception if the system is entirely
under the sole control of the person, e.g. a
cybernetic management system for someone whose body
has been mostly replaced with machines (repairing from
a grevious accident, upgrading from the human norm, or
whatever).  But that exception precludes any
connection to the outside world.  One could have a
"neural interface" in the normal definition on top of
this, but that would link the outside world through
the user's brain to the body - and any competent user
would filter out viruses if this was at all an issue.
(It's one thing if lax security disables your
computer.  It's another if lax security disables
*you*, and in RL situations where that has been the
case, computer viruses as we know them tend not to be
able to infect.)

> The analogy of a virus not being able to run on
> windows and linux is
> not really apt here. A more accurate analogy would
> be a virus that is
> translated/compiled to run on a new operating
> system/architecture.
> Imagine a computer virus that contains it's own
> cross-compiler and it's
> own source code....that's a much better analogy to
> what I'm suggesting.

Which are notable for their absence in reality.  Each
platform has different holes that a virus exploits;
trying the same holes on different systems tends not
to work.  (One can imagine a virus as you describe,
but that's really multiple viruses, one for each
platform carrying the other viruses as almost junk
data for its own purposes.)
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat


Cheers,
Nige

--
  A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, 
butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet,  set a bone, comfort 
the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, 
program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die 
gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.

  -- Robert Heinlein