Who would willingly have a chip in their head that could make them kill themselves if someone got into it? Attacking is so much easier than defence in cyber-warfare.
No one would if you market it like that, but the key is the law of unintended consequences. In other words, I can see where the logic would result in that effect, and one without any military applications. Basically, you design a chip that can move your body according to some preprogrammed way (say, training muscle memory to follow optimum movement for something like
sports or exercise - market it as the ultimate "learn by doing" chip for the perfect work-out, without "wasting" time to learn it yourself), or control autonomous processes (the aforementioned pacemakers, which you yourself mentioned exist). Then, you decide that you might need to update the firmware, say, because there might be some particular issues, or because they might need to be updated to match the individual person over a long period of time, or because you might want to load new patterns onto the thing. Then, one of your engineers has a brainchild: rather than forcing them to dig out the chip via invasive surgery then put it back in via the same (and the usual potential for health complication in having multiple surgical operations back-to-back), simply stick a small, cheap wi-fi transceiver on the thing. Instant vector, especially if they don't close the authentication gaps properly.
Alternately, if you believe basilisks are a possibility rather than fantasy, anything that ties to the optical nerve/visual cortex to transmit images to the brain - say, a "smartphone chip," cyberbrain, off-loaded auxiliary memory core, or the like would be a potential risk, since they would bypass certain implicit filters present in the eye (that is, that the rods and cones can only be stimulated in particular ways contingent on their chemistry). Mind you, I don't believe Langford's basilisks are anything but fantasy, and the optic nerve would not be an avenue to enforce muscle control (though any such attempt might make for some very...interesting effects as your visual cortex struggles to interpret the stimuli as visual information, like opening a JPG in Notepad), but that is another alternate avenue for killing people via cybernetics. While a phone chip would in its simplest incarnation only need to send information to the brain via the cochlear and optic nerves, assuming you don't tie it to external implants/devices over the eye and ear, most of the popular conceptions of the remaining two options above are typically tied to the wetbrain more closely to facilitate a more efficient transmission of information, and would have alternate avenues of attack that don't rely on basilisks.
EDIT: Oh, but killing someone by overriding their sensory inputs would be even easier than a basilisk. Let's say you're driving on the freeway at cruise speed and suddenly you get hit with the visual equivalent of an really bad LSD trip? You're now operating a vehicle massing over a ton with kinetic energy to match, surrounded by other vehicles in like state, completely blind. And that's just the unsubtle method...
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Topic: The Science Fiction thread, "What is, is" (Read 9740 times)