#chip implants

Finding Personal Affirmation in Consciousness When a child becomes self-aware, they ask themselves the profound philosophical question, “Who am I?” This is, of course, the very definition of self-awareness. The child looks around for validation and finds their family. The child is loved by family, friends, and members of the extended clan or tribe. And so the child finds its sense of self-worth…

The Dark Side Has Cookies

Aloha kākou. Jim Crow Joe is now making threats against the American people. “Get Your Fhony Fauci Jab, Or Pay The Price.” What exactly is the price is quite clear, but it’s obviously a threat. Whatever happened to “My Body, My Choice?” That used to be the left’s mantra when it came to abortions. “Ultimately, those who are not vaccinated will end up paying the price,” Jim Crow Joe said. “The…

Guy Clapperton, Medium, Jul 16, 2018

Dave Coplin is trying to explain to me why people across two continents are suddenly allowing their employers to put microchips under their skin.

“I do this to my dog--why wouldn’t I do it to myself?” Coplin says. I’m not convinced, so he launches into an anecdote about a club on the Mediterranean party island of Ibiza where people could chip themselves and then use the chip to buy drinks. Coplin suspects this was because they weren’t wearing many clothes.

But chipping yourself because you’re half-naked and don’t have a pocket for your wallet is very different from allowing your employer to chip you. So, how did we get here?

Coplin, who heads a consultancy called the Envisioners, says there are real benefits for both employer and employee--if we can only get over our squeamishness. “If it adds value, I’m all for it,” he says. “Today we look at people doing it and it feels a bit weird, but in reality there is something inevitable about it.”

Patrick McMullan is president of Three Square Market in Wisconsin. After following experiments at Swedish incubator Epicenter in Stockholm, which has been experimenting with chipping since 2015, his company decided to develop the technology further. Naturally, as a supplier and a developer, McMullan has a chip implant himself--one roughly the size of a grain of rice implanted under the skin between his thumb and index finger. It’s based on near-field communication (NFC) technology--the same chips that are used in contactless credit cards or mobile payments. Implants are done quickly and simply with a syringe and very little blood.

One current limitation, McMullan says, is that because the chip is a passive device, there is no way it can be tracked. For now, that means the chip is for accessing the building, logging into computers, and paying for things from the canteen. But McMullan’s employees are on a mission “to change the world,” he says, and more than 70 of them so far have volunteered to be part of the experiment.

The idea seems to be spreading. In addition to Three Square Market, at least 160 people have been chipped at Epicenter’s monthly “chipping parties.” Several staff members at CityWatcher.com, a surveillance company in Cincinnati, have gotten chips, as have some at a digital marketing company in Belgium called NewFusion. No doubt it’s good publicity, but chipping advocates genuinely believe this will become common practice over the next decade.

Chips will offer more benefits as the technology progresses, McMullan believes. “We are developing medical uses that will monitor vital signs. Doctors will be able to proactively treat patients rather than always react,” he says. McMullan believes the numbers of chipped employees worldwide will reach millions over a few years because the benefits of a sub-$100 chip are potentially huge.

McMullan sees no downside, despite obvious concerns that it feels perfectly dystopian to be intimately connected to your employer in a way that is hard to control or remove. Take his own idea of chips monitoring people’s health: There is obvious advantage in future embedded technologies that could monitor cholesterol, blood sugar levels, or even just dehydration.

But what if someone had a chip to monitor alcohol intake as part of an agreement to quit? Would a surgeon be allowed to refuse to operate? Could an insurance company hike the patient’s premiums if they fell off the wagon? The question of what information could or should be gathered and where it could or should go will become far more complex as chips become more advanced and more widespread. And other experts have raised concerns about hacking, as well as known health problems already associated with similar chips used in pets.

“Obviously, privacy is a massive concern,” Coplin adds. “What will people do with the data? Who’s going to see it? In practical terms, it’s bad enough that I have to carry my phone around with me, and my wallet. If this gets around some of that, I’m up for it.”

Despite the concerns, many people seem to accept it’s going to happen--and quite rapidly. Lynda Shaw, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of Your Brain Is Boss, believes chipping is a natural progression that is likely to be more acceptable to young people.

In some ways, this is already an established technology, at least among people with health problems. We already use chips for cochlear implants and even for bypassing parts of the brain in the event of brain damage, Shaw points out. “Chipping the human body is not news, but there’s always the sinister side of us that says this is a bit too Orwellian,” she says. People might become worried about computer viruses living in their bodies or about what happens when and if the hardware becomes corrupted.

Rohit Talwar, futurist and CEO of the think tank Fast Future, sees chipping becoming widespread very quickly, particularly among tech companies that want to demonstrate they are forward thinking.

Chipping will also be used, Talwar says, among companies “who want very high security so people don’t get into systems or part of the building they shouldn’t, and who want to demonstrate to clients that they’re cutting edge in security terms. You might also see it being used as a way of enabling people to exchange money in canteens, vending machines--it will get rid of identity passes.”

Shaw sees benefits as well. If someone is ill and has a pacemaker or uses anticoagulant medication, making that information available with a quick scan could save their life. But she also points to darker implications for crime scenes. In regions where the crime rate is high and bodies turn up dismembered, Shaw notes that a criminal wouldn’t need the whole body to breach security, just the limb in which a chip had been embedded. “You could end up inadvertently inciting a more horrible crime than the one originally being contemplated,” she says.

Talwar’s view is that dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. A generation born as digital natives might see this as a natural evolution and plastic passes as old-fashioned, arcane, and certainly not able to capture the kind of information that a chip inside our bodies could capture about, say, health.

“Older generations may see this as terribly invasive,” Talwar says. “I was at an event last year where they were chipping people just for fun, and the lines were going down the corridor of people waiting to be chipped--for the story and for the experience.”

So, where is chipping going? Talwar sees it as part of an inevitable process in which those who are pioneers have said for some time that if humans are going to keep up with artificial intelligence, we will have to enhance our brains and bodies.

“This is just the start point of that process. You could easily predict your mobile phone memory being inserted into you, chips to accelerate your memory and your brain,” Talwar says. “We could see a massive acceleration in this as we move into enhancing and augmenting ourselves and stepping into the world of transhumanism.”

Coplin sees chipping as part of a dialogue about how we relate to machines. He notes that one man in Australia who tried removing the chip from a travel card and embedding it in his hand failed because the terms and conditions said not to deface the card. “At the moment, it feels weird,” Coplin says, “but at the moment, I might have a device on my wrist that might have that technology. Why not a little further under my skin?”

Society has always contested the potential of technology and the changes it forces. A quarter-century ago, few people predicted the advent of mobile phones--fewer still anticipated that we’d use them as cameras and music centers. And now there are additional pressures on technologies.

Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY, Aug. 9, 2017

LOS ANGELES--You will get chipped. It’s just a matter of time.

In the aftermath of a Wisconsin firm embedding microchips in employees last week to ditch company badges and corporate logons, the Internet has entered into full-throated debate.

Religious activists are so appalled, they’ve been penning nasty 1-star reviews of the company, Three Square Market, on Google, Glassdoor and social media.

On the flip side, seemingly everyone else wants to know: Is this what real life is going to be like soon at work? Will I be chipped?

“It will happen to everybody,” says Noelle Chesley, 49, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “But not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids.”

Gene Munster, an investor and analyst at Loup Ventures, is an advocate for augmented reality, virtual reality and other new technologies. He thinks embedded chips in human bodies is 50 years away. “In 10 years, Facebook, Google, Apple and Tesla will not have their employees chipped,” he says. “You’ll see some extreme forward-looking tech people adopting it, but not large companies.”

The idea of being chipped has too “much negative connotation” today, but by 2067 “we will have been desensitized by the social stigma,” Munster says.

For now, Three Square Market, or 32M, hasn’t offered concrete benefits for getting chipped beyond badge and log-on stats. Munster says it was a “PR stunt” for the company to get attention to its product and it certainly succeeded, getting the small start-up air play on CBS, NBC and ABC, and generating headlines worldwide. The company, which sells corporate cafeteria kiosks designed to replace vending machines, would like the kiosks to handle cashless transactions.

This would go beyond paying with your smartphone. Instead, chipped customers would simply wave their hands in lieu of Apple Pay and other mobile-payment systems.

The benefits don’t stop there. In the future, consumers could zip through airport scanners sans passport or driver’s license; open doors; start cars; and operate home automation systems. All of it, if the technology pans out, with the simple wave of a hand.

The embedded chip is not a GPS tracker, which is what many critics initially feared. However, analysts believe future chips will track our every move.

For example, pets for years have been embedded with chips to store their name and owner contact. Indeed, 32M isn’t the first company to embed chips in employees. In 2001, Applied Digital Solutions installed the “VeriChip” to access medical records but the company eventually changed hands and stopped selling the chip in 2010.

In Sweden, BioHax says nearly 3,000 customers have had its chip embedded to do many things, including ride the national rail system without having to show the conductor a ticket.

In the U.S., Dangerous Things, a Seattle-based firm, says it has sold “tens of thousands” of chips to consumers via its website. The chip and installation cost about $200.

After years of being a subculture, “the time is now” for chips to be more commonly used, says Amal Graafstra, founder of Dangerous Things. “We’re going to start to see chip implants get the same realm of acceptance as piercings and tattoos do now.”

In other words, they’ll be more visible, but not mainstream yet.

“It becomes part of you the way a cellphone does,” Graafstra says. “You can never forget it, and you can’t lose it. And you have the capability to communicate with machines in a way you couldn’t before.”

But after what we saw in Wisconsin last week, what’s next for the U.S. workforce? A nation of workers chipping into their pods at Federal Express, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and other top corporations?

Experts contend consumers will latch onto chips before companies do.

Chesley says corporations are slower to respond to massive change and that there will be an age issue. Younger employees will be more open to it, while older workers will balk. “Most employers who have inter-generational workforces might phase it in slowly,” she says. “I can’t imagine people my age and older being enthusiastic about having devices put into their bodies.”

Adds Alec Levenson, a researcher at University of Southern California’s Center for Effective Organizations, “The vast majority of people will not put up with this.”

Three Square Market said the chips are voluntary, but Chesley says that if a company announces a plan to be chipped, the expectation is that you will get chipped--or risk losing out on advancement, raises and being a team player.

“That’s what we’re worried about,” says Bryan Allen, chief of staff for state Rep. Tina Davis (D), who is introducing a bill in Pennsylvania to outlaw mandatory chip embedding. “If the tech is out there, what’s to stop an employer from saying either you do this, or you can’t work here anymore.”

Should future corporations dive in to chipping their employees, they will have huge issues of “trust” to contend with, says Kent Grayson, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

“You’ve got to have a lot of trust to put one of those in your body,” Grayson says. Workers will need assurances the chip is healthy, can’t be hacked, and its information is private, he says.

Meanwhile, religious advocates have taken to social media to express their displeasure about chipping, flooding 32M’s Facebook page with comments like “boycott,” “completely unnecessary” and “deplorable.”

Get used to it, counsels Chesley.

Ten years ago, employees didn’t look at corporate e-mail over the weekend. Now they we do, “whether we like it or not,” he says.