Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwegner | Hacker News Reader

Unique? Maybe. Unreplicable? I can't imagine so, we're all just a bunch of molecules.

At some point in the perhaps-not-too-distant future, we will likely have very sophisticated brain-scanning technologies, and combined with advances against biometric methods, basically any form of authentication will be useless.

I have absolutely no idea how to get around this, and can only hope that our society has advanced enough by that point that we don't need to keep any secrets at all. Not much chance of that really, IMHO...

View on HN

That's an rather interesting idea. If you could get Cory Doctorow to write "The Day the Password Died" from your prompt, I'd be very happy.

Synopsis: an evil government steals the private thoughts and passwords of its citizens, most of whom are unaware of the threat. A few paranoid individuals come up with increasingly bizarre biometric passwords, but the government has secretly approved unauthorized (and speedy) cloning to bypass these protections.

Finally, the freedom fighters use the government's own technology against it, replicating the president's bio-metrics in order to shutdown and disclose the program.

No meaningful political change occurs.

That would be pretty cool. I can't imagine that nobody else has thought of this idea before, though...

What really scares me, though, is when we get to the point of not just being able to read thoughts, but being able to write them. How would you ever know that your memories and emotions have not been tampered with? As far as you know, you've always loved your corporate overlords, and would never do anything to work against them...

Isn't that the point of 1984?

The protagonist is unable to make a physical record, and so must trust his brain retain any proof of the government's wrongdoing.

However, the brain is a poor vessel for this - it can be manipulated and tortured to discount information. And so, Winston ends up loving Big Brother.

Paper and bits are what we rely upon; there is a reason eye-witness reports are trusted so little in comparison to physical evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com