Ep 353: Super Jesus [80:05m]:
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“Not forever, just until you get back up your strength.”
This is the second day in a row I’ve seen the tech headline about a guy who got infected with a computer virus. Ok, so at first glance, it sounds pretty sci fi right? But once you read the actual article, you quickly realize that the writer is just solidifying a notion that, once we fully integrate computer technology into our lives, we are going to face the same problems we currently face with viruses, malware, and probably spam. The only difference is, when your computer gets infected with one of these lovely little problems, the computer can, for the most part, be fixed easily. Sure, depending on what kind of problem the computer is having, and how that problem came to manifest itself, the end user will have to face a little responsible embarrassment, and of course, a nice little bill. But, when you look at how computers are being merged with our lives in a more ubiquitous light, common sense rings the bells and alarms that this might cause some serious problems. As we allow computers to run more and more of our day to day lives, these problems will become quite serious. Sure, having a computer on your desk that’s infected with a virus is quite annoying, but all you have to do is unplug the ethernet cable, and the virus is basically rendered inoperative. Of course, depending on the virus, it can wreak some havoc on the computer system itself even to the point of rendering the computer itself inoperative, but again, unless that computer remains hooked up to other important infrastructure, nothing that bad is going to happen.
Now, take that same scenario, but instead of the target being a computer sitting on your desk, it’s the computer that control’s your vehicle, or your pace maker, or eventually, perhaps even parts of your mind and body. Imagine, as they talk about in the article, that we reach a point in society where everyone has a computer chip implanted inside their hand that controls access to security permissions at your office, all of your identity information, your bank information, communications, health information, or anything else we will allow computers to do for us. Imagine if that infected chip was controlling your pace maker, or your hearing aid, or your memory implants. If those devices we trusted enough to implant inside our bodies in the first place, end up getting infected by some nasty computer virus, the results could be quite fatal. The further down this technological rabbit hole we tumble, the more interconnectedness we experience between our flesh and bone and our computer technology, the more these little problems are going to have extremely large, and possibly even fatal consequences. As the scientists demonstrated in their experiment, it is very easy for a well written virus to transfer itself from the infected chip, via the wireless air waves, into the computers they communicate with. Once there they spread like wild fire causing major headaches for the I.T. crowd.
So like I said, once your pace maker or memory implants get infected, it’s not like you can just do a simple format and recover. I just hope that by the time this happens, we have developed some sort of quantum computing firewall antivirus solution that will make writing viruses almost obsolete. Unless of course we end up with a quantum virus of some sort. But, by the time that happens, it’s going to be far too late to do anything about it. Prevention in this case, really is the best medicine. Good luck humanity! I have a feeling we’re going to need it.
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