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Comment by Tuxer | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised nobody talked about the potential implications of effectively embedding, now that the device is standalone, a lithium ion battery into your skull.

I'm not a battery hater whatsoever but in the case of a thermal runoff if the battery starts burning... there is no way to get it out.

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Seems like a nightmare now that I think about it, like you get a ransomware popup beamed into your visual cortex saying:

"We are in your brain, wire the contents of your bank account to the following bitcoin adres: <adress>. If you do not comply, we will blow up your neuralink, if you try to alert anyone, we will blow up your neuralink. We are watching, you have 2 hours, good luck."

"01:59:59"

"01:59:58"

...

"it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the ... middle all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself."

-Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age

This imaginary problem can be solved by having a hardware off switch.

Imagine your brain got so used to the neuralink interactions and benefits that turning it off causes an insurmontable pain (like drugs)

Sure if someone has two improbable situations combined, they are doomed. But they are more likely to be killed by a lightning.

/If we sense that you think about turning off your neuralink, we will blow it up/

If we can read your mind, we don't need to ask you to do anything, we will just read all your passwords and do everything ourselves.

Reminds me of https://mobile.twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/2856708222...

To be clear, I don't think this is a solution to either.

The entire reason why people suffer from anti-social behavior delivered through computers is that computers are a real part of our world at this point. Simply disengaging may not be an effective way of dealing with it.

It's still a funny tweet though.

Lithium ion is not one thing, one type of battery, but describes a very wide range of batteries. If you are willing to pay more and use more advanced materials for the difference parts of the battery, you can make it way secure.

We don't do that yet for cars as for the amount of batteries you need, it would make the car to expensive. However for medical devices, such batteries are already in us and with all the research into batteries today, this will improve even more.

I'm more concerned about my head being drilled open, metal put into my head and having a BLE connection. The battery is the least of my worries.

I wondered about this, but is it not already the case with other existing devices like pacemakers etc?

Yes, and that's why there are such high standards for medical devices.

In the presentation Elon specifically mentions their involvement with the FDA and highlighted their focus on safety (drawing a parallel with Tesla five star ratings)

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