You will get chippedâeventually
Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY, Aug. 9, 2017
LOS ANGELES--You will get chipped. Itâs 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, theyâve 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?
âIt will happen to everybody,â says Noelle Chesley, 49, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. âBut not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids.â
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. âIn 10 years, Facebook, Google, Apple and Tesla will not have their employees chipped,â he says. âYouâll see some extreme forward-looking tech people adopting it, but not large companies.â
The idea of being chipped has too âmuch negative connotationâ today, but by 2067 âwe will have been desensitized by the social stigma,â Munster says.
For now, Three Square Market, or 32M, hasnât offered concrete benefits for getting chipped beyond badge and log-on stats. Munster says it was a âPR stuntâ 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 donât stop there. In the future, consumers could zip through airport scanners sans passport or driverâs 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 isnât the first company to embed chips in employees. In 2001, Applied Digital Solutions installed the âVeriChipâ 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 âtens of thousandsâ of chips to consumers via its website. The chip and installation cost about $200.
After years of being a subculture, âthe time is nowâ for chips to be more commonly used, says Amal Graafstra, founder of Dangerous Things. âWeâre going to start to see chip implants get the same realm of acceptance as piercings and tattoos do now.â
In other words, theyâll be more visible, but not mainstream yet.
âIt becomes part of you the way a cellphone does,â Graafstra says. âYou can never forget it, and you canât lose it. And you have the capability to communicate with machines in a way you couldnât before.â
But after what we saw in Wisconsin last week, whatâs 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. âMost employers who have inter-generational workforces might phase it in slowly,â she says. âI canât imagine people my age and older being enthusiastic about having devices put into their bodies.â
Adds Alec Levenson, a researcher at University of Southern Californiaâs Center for Effective Organizations, âThe vast majority of people will not put up with this.â
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.
âThatâs what weâre worried about,â says Bryan Allen, chief of staff for state Rep. Tina Davis (D), who is introducing a bill in Pennsylvania to outlaw mandatory chip embedding. âIf the tech is out there, whatâs to stop an employer from saying either you do this, or you canât work here anymore.â
Should future corporations dive in to chipping their employees, they will have huge issues of âtrustâ to contend with, says Kent Grayson, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
âYouâve got to have a lot of trust to put one of those in your body,â Grayson says. Workers will need assurances the chip is healthy, canât be hacked, and its information is private, he says.
Meanwhile, religious advocates have taken to social media to express their displeasure about chipping, flooding 32Mâs Facebook page with comments like âboycott,â âcompletely unnecessaryâ and âdeplorable.â
Get used to it, counsels Chesley.
Ten years ago, employees didnât look at corporate e-mail over the weekend. Now they we do, âwhether we like it or not,â he says.
Be it wearable technology or an embedded chip, the always on-always connected chip is going to be part of our lives, she says.