Prof. Newton Howard, a Brain and Cognitive Scientist, the former Director of the MIT Mind Machine Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently a Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Functional Neurosurgery at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Oxford Computational Neuroscience Laboratory participates in Risk Roundup to discuss "Mind Control Technology". Since the beginning of times, we humans have been creating tools to help us interact with the world around us. Now we are moving inwards and developing the tools to help us communicate with the world inside us. While the nature of tools has evolved from physical to digital, and now neural, our brain is effectively becoming the tool for interaction, communication, collaboration, and control. From electrode in many different shapes being implanted in the human brain to transmit and receive signals to non-invasive devices that translate brain waves into commands that control not only computer but also body parts are already becoming a reality.

The rise of the silicon brain that can give rise to thought, emotion and behavior in a machine seems to be on the way. This is mainly due to rapid advances in software and hardware that are paving the way for next generation computational systems with cognitive abilities modeled after the human brain. This will prove to be a significant evolutionary development and especially important to enhancing machine intelligence for the complex problems that need to be solved for the future of humanity. So, as we envision a rapidly evolving silicon brain taking in the data from its surroundings in cyberspace, geospace, space (CGS) and run the data through some known/unknown computing processes and then tell the computer/machine to act, feel or behave in a certain way seems to bring humanity a lot more questions than answers. This is mainly because it is not known how the information on the silicon brain will be processed, stored or recalled; how the computer commands will emerge and become effective, and even how the silicon brain will experience the sensory world around it in CGS, and how it will think, feel or empathize.

The rise of the silicon brain that can give rise to thought, emotion and behavior in a machine seems to be on the way. This is mainly due to rapid advances in software and hardware that are paving the way for next generation computational systems with cognitive abilities modeled after the human brain. This will prove to be a significant evolutionary development and especially important to enhancing machine intelligence for the complex problems that need to be solved for the future of humanity. So, as we envision a rapidly evolving silicon brain taking in the data from its surroundings in cyberspace, geospace, space (CGS) and run the data through some known / unknown computing processes and then tell the computer / machine to act, feel or behave in a certain way seems to bring humanity a lot more questions than answers. This is mainly because it is not known how the information on the silicon brain will be processed, stored or recalled; how the computer commands will emerge and become effective, and even how the silicon brain will experience the sensory world around it in CGS, and how it will think, feel or empathize.