Why You Should Get a Chip Implant
www.msnbc.com/news/316518.asp?cp1=1
September 27, 1999
OPINION
Capabilities would make life so much better or would
they?
How would you like to avoid waiting in lines for the
rest of your life? Breeze through everywhere like you owned the place.
Watch lights snap on, doors open automatically, money pop out of ATMs
as you approach. Never have to show an ID, buy a ticket, carry keys,
remember a password. You would leave stores loaded with packages and
waltz right past the cashiers. You
wouldn't have to carry a wallet. Ever. Family and friends could find
you instantly in any crowd.
Would you get a chip implant to take advantage of the
possibilities envisioned here?
* 7840 responses:
Yes 24%
THERE'S ONLY ONE CATCH. You would need to have a tiny
little chip implanted in your body. No big deal. Just ask Kevin
Warwick, a British professor who had a silicon-based transponder
surgically inserted into his forearm last year. You would think from
all the attention that the natty professor was jacking chips into his
brain like some cheese-ball sci-fi android. Truth is, his modest
implant simply turned him into a walking EZ-Pass.
Warwick's gizmo is a coil of wire and a few chips
embedded in a small glass capsule about a tenth of an inch wide and a
little less than an inch long, generates a 64-bit number when zapped
by an RF transmitter. A receiver then looks it up in a database.
Animal shelters have implanted millions of these electronic IDs in
cats, dogs, and birds. Metal tags can fall off, and tattooed numbers
could be placed anywhere and are often hard to find. Who wants to play
slap-and-tickle with a snarling rottweiler? A lot of us carry similar
mechanisms inside ID cards, to open doors. But these can get lost,
forgotten, or stolen and misused. And biometric devices like retinal
scanners and fingerprint sensors are intrusive and imperfect. Besides,
people have been sticking all sorts of things in their bodies for
years. Pacemakers to fix broken hearts, silicone to perk up skinny
chests, Norplant to prevent third-world countries from becoming
fourth-world ones.
Consider the benefits. It would end password PINsanity
forever. Sensors would wave chipped consumers through checkout lines
and tollbooths. Contractors would build implant-friendly homes and
offices with Gatesian gimmicks that could customize temperature,
background music, and even images on wall-size flat-screen displays as
you move from room to room. It would help sort out newborn babies,
AlzheimerÆs patients, amnesiacs, comatose (or worse) accident victims,
and military casualties. In fact, thereÆs an entire
paranoid-delusional faction out there that believes the government is
already chipping soldiers and prisoners. And kidnap-prone executives
are supposedly implanting tiny Lo-Jack devices to track their
movements. Internal chips could measure irregular heartbeats and
blood-sugar levels in diabetics. Or, as Warwick points out, chips
could sense muscular movements so you could play air guitar, type on
virtual air keyboards, move invisible mice. And Warwick wonÆt make a
lot of new redneck friends with his suggestion that gun buyers first
get chipped before their weapons are delivered.
Computers are rapidly evolving into Internet terminals.
When your chip goes in, you'll be able to walk up to any terminal in
any office and log on instantly. Incoming phone calls and faxes will
automatically be routed to wherever you happen to be. Of course,
employers could also log your time
in the john or at the water cooler. If you don't think you're already
being monitored, you're wrong. Your credit cards, telephone bills,
supermarket club cards, Internet purchases and public records like
home purchases and car licenses already do a pretty good job. How will
they convince people to implant these chips? First, they'll hype the
convenience of leaving your keys, credit cards and money at home. Then
they'll automate everything
from cash registers to toll booths so if you're chipped you can zoom
through in a digital carpool lane. Me, I'll wait.
1999 ZDNet. All rights reserved.
by Paul Somerson
PC Computing ZDNN
No 76%