I chanced upon this article where the author is spouting the benefits of getting ‘chipped’. And that’s exactly as Skynet-like as it sounds. He says that to avoid a Wall-E existence for the human race, we must all get chipped and start monitoring our health using accurate data from within our bodies themselves. He himself admits this is a “drastic” monitoring system, but says it’s “imperative that we get a little mad scientist” for tech to have a long-term positive effect.
He points to Misfit Wearables, as an example of how technology companies are starting to create devices that become more necessity than luxury. However, I think it’s a far cry from saying that wearable computing is becoming something everyone needs to saying that we all need to have subcutaneous chips embedded inside us.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally see the benefits of having a device embedded inside of you, able to measure your body temperature, weight, movement and heart rate far more accurately than external devices ever could. But doesn’t that creep you out, at least a little bit? The fact that there is something inside you that is digitally rendering everything about your body. And if you recall the TED talk “All Your Devices Can be Hacked” where a security team managed to fully hack various technology – one of them was a pacemaker. Imagine if someone hacked the chip that this guy is proposing we all get installed into our bodies? Imagine a terrorist threatening to kill everyone with the flick of a switch.
To go down a more conspiratorial route, there’s the whole 1984 Big Brother aspect – who’s to say that the government (or, at least, the company that makes the chips) aren’t secretly storing all that information about your body. Imagine if someone unauthorized then got into their database.
The whole concept of technology being actually inside my body just seems like a step too far for me. But then again, there was a time when people said that transferring their money electronically was a step too far for them. Now that’s everyday practice. So who knows?
What do you think? Should we all get chipped or is this the beginning of submitting ourselves to Skynet?