Swedish Athletes Back GPS Implants to Combat Drug Use

paulraps writes "Swedish athletes Carolina Klüft and Stefan Holm have proposed a radical technological measure to stop top level competitors from taking performance-enhancing drugs. Klüft and Holm, reigning Olympic champions in the heptathlon and high-jump events, argue that competitors at the highest level should either have computer chips implanted into their skin or GPS transmitters attached to their training bags so that the authorities can keep tabs on them at all times."

Comments

Re:WTF?

[jsse]

They learn from rental cars, where GPS can track if the rent car broke the speed limit and that implies extra charge.

If the athletes was found moving at around 40 km/h all the time, they must have taken steroid.

If they're moving over 60 km/h, they must be driving a car.

....nevermind then.

Why stop 'em?

[Wansu]

Why not create a "modified division" for those who take performance enhancing substances?

Re:Why stop 'em?

[Opportunist]

Because in some countries, the athlets wouldn't take them willingly. They're simply "convinced" that it's better for their health. Or that of their loved ones.

Re:Why stop 'em?

[the_humeister]

You mean like this???

Things will change.

[PHAEDRU5]

A few years out we're going to be watching athletic events that *highlight* the mods. ("Fred Bloggs is using corpuscles engineered at Georgia Tech that guarantee his ability to sprint for 15 minutes without having to take a breath.")

This whole bias against tech augmentation is getting me down. The sooner we embrace it, and the more we embrace it, the longer we'll live, and with higher quality of life.

Hell, we ought to be giving awards to people who volunteer to test exotic human enhancement technologies right now.

Re:Things will change.

[paleo2002]

This brings up a number of new problems:

1) Do we mix the cyborgs, mutants, and chemically-enhanced athletes together or have separate leagues?

2) Will there be a "research capital cap"?

3) If a player's arm lands in the stands, does someone get to keep it?

really bad idea

[Raisey-raison]

This is a really bad idea. This is where it starts - with Star athletes. Then people wonder about dangerous criminals (ie after they have completed their sentences). Then it moves to children (to keep them safe). Very soon it no longer is a 'choice'. You can't keep your job without it. And eventually it becomes mandated by law. When some private company knows where you are 24/7 it's certain that if the government wants to know, it will easily be able to find out (especially now due to the patriot act). Imagine - no more cops using radar to give out tickets. They can do it from a central computer.

Then the chip might be able to monitor a bit more about you. What level of hormone x or y, diseases or how oxygenated your blood is. They could figure out your mood. What's next? Perhaps a feedback loop. If hormone x is too high get the chip to release an electric signal. You insurance company might drop you if they don't like your lifestyle as measured by the chip. Child custody dispute...go look at the data from the chip. Then I am betting some people who remove their chips be criminalized for doing so.

Beyond or the legal uses will be the illegal ones. People hacking into the database to plan the perfect robbery or the perfect blackmailing.. Or the FBI abusing its powers to snoop anyway.

The worst part about it is that it is so unnecessary. Some athletes do drugs. Big deal. They are hurting themselves. Perhaps hurting professional sports. Are we going to sacrifice personal liberty to ensure the integrity of professional sports. And please don't give me 'its for the children'. If we followed that excuse every time we would end up with a police state and no freedom.

Er, we can't actually do this yet.

[Animats]

We can't actually build a small implantable GPS yet. Passive RFID tags, yes; GPS receiver with uplink, no.

Well, in theory you could build a pacemaker-sized device powered by a nuclear battery, but that would take major surgery to install, and approval from the FDA and DOE.

Re:Stupid Scientists

[OrangeTide]

steroids have significant side effects and damage your body severely if used long term. To compete in professional sports should not require everyone to burn the candle at both ends.

Come up with performance enhancing drugs that don't have long term side-effects, then we can talk about allowing them in sports.

Human emotion? Heh.

[Moraelin]

I'm sorry, but from human emotion? Other than some quick modern redefinition, the idea of "honour" was mostly what it is on WoW. I can think of at least one time and place off the top of my head, where they actually had honour points for killing enemies. Ok, not everyone was that organized, but mostly it was about warfare and your duty to go die for your king, just because kings are so awesome and have a divine right.

So, I'm sorry, but exactly which fundamental human emotion was at work there? Do we have that fundamental an instinct to kill each other? Or what?

It and the closely related notion of "chivalry" was also warped to fit the current interests of the rich and powerful, and included such quirks as:

- while you were supposed to afford chivalry and honour to the enemy nobles and knights, because they could be ransomed for good money, it was perfectly ok to kill prisoners if they're pesants and mercenary. (Before Agincourt, for example, Henry V told his troops that while the nobles would be captured and held for ransome, everyone else damn better fight for their lives. And just to illustrate that he _was_ right, when the French managed to capture the undefended English baggage train, they did kill the unarmed attendants and page boys, mostly children.)

- same about your fucking _own_ troops, if they're of low birth. (E.g., at Crecy, the French knights rode over their own Genoese crossbowmen mercenaries, who were retreating after taking heavy losses from the English crossbowmen. Apparently precisely _because_ of such a fucked up idea of honour: the knights were apparently disgusted that the mercenary cowards wouldn't stand there and die gladly for the king.)

- but it's ok to kill the captured nobles too, if you can't hold on to them or it's otherwise too inconvenient. (E.g., Henry V at Agincourt again.)

- and those rules of chivalry only applied if you weren't outnumbered or something (See, the Black Prince.)

- and while chest-thumping about honour and chivalry in battle, it was ok to loot the peasants' grain for your troops and horses along your way. Both enemy peasants and your own.

- the same knights who'd be all chivalrous to other knights, had no problem with beating their wives _literally_ senseless. (There are "manuals" for knights who recommended exactly that. Oh, and at least one recommended breaking the wife's nose, so other guys won't find her pretty while you're away.)

Etc, etc, etc.

And just so I'm not so euro-centric, the Japanese atrocities in WW2 were almost all motivated by a fucked-up feudal idea of "honour" too.

The massacre of Nanking, for example, was because the oh-so-honourable Japanese warriors were disgusted at the idea that an enemy soldier would do something as dishonourable as throwing away their uniform and hiding among the civilians instead of surrendering. So, you know, going on a rape and massacre rampage was the proper way to punish that dishonour.

Or their atrocious treatment of prisoners was motivated, or at least rationalized, by some fucked up idea that a properly honourable warrior dies, but never surrenders. So obviously the enemies that surrendered were so dishonoured, as to not even qualify as humans any more.

To make things funny, some of those exaggerated ideas of Samurai honour and valour, stemmed from an era where Japan had no wars for hundreds of years. So they wrote a lot about being fearless and stuff, without having actually seen a battlefield in their lives, and knowing that they probably never will. And each author tried to sound even more completely fearless than the previous generation... on paper.

Etc.

So, heh, human emotion? The history of "honour" is just a codified justification for being an arsehole. It was part indoctrination so some dolts would go die for you, and part rationalization of why you're an arsehole and it's good to be one. The only good aspects of it, were the ones where you stood to make a personal gain. E.g., yeah, you were supposed to be honourable and hospitable with captured nobles, because they could be ransomed, but that didn't extend to anyone who couldn't be ransomed.

Re:Human emotion? Heh.

[lordholm]

Well, you make a few good points, but the origins of honour comes from preliterate societies where trust and being true to ones word ment everything (as the only contracts you had were oral). Honour is not necessarily a battlefield issue, but can be a social one.

In Swedish, there are two words that translate roughly to the English "honour", they are "heder" and "ära". "Ära" is closely related to "glory", but is not necessarily exactly the same, and is often translated as "honour".

So while what you were saying is true, it does not paint the whole picture due to the ambiguity of the English word "honour". Further, the germanic pre-christian notion of honour had nothing to do with being good to your king, but being true to ones word. If you made a pledge to the king, you were of course bound to that, but making that pledge were something you decided about and not something you had to do.

Minor distinction

[Moraelin]

Regardless of what it came from, that's what it was warped up into. I guess, if nothing else, because if you deal in inflexible ideals and occasionally absolutes, some sociopath will manage to use them against you, aikido-style. In fact, make you use them against yourself.

Talk about "community" and whatnot, is good and fine, but it never was that much of a "collectivist" thing since... oh, the early stone age or so. It was some self-appointed leaders and there were the guys who served them. Whether as formalized as slavery or serfdom, or just tribal shamans/chieftains/etc exploiting everyone else, the difference isn't that massive.

Whether you lived or died, or whether you were a nobody, very rarely had to do with what everyone else really thought. It had to do with what said noble/chieftain/shaman told them to think.

And you rarely had a choice about pledging to such a leader. You were pledged de facto or even de jure by just being born there. You were held to notions of duty, honour, obedience to your liege (or tribal equivalent) whether you wanted it or not.

And if you wanted to move up the social pyramid at all, it invariably required some such pledge too. If you moved to (or even were born into) the warrior class, you'd have to pledge your life to the warlord. If you moved to the city, you pledged your life and sword arm to whatever demagogue weaseled his way into being "community leader" there. Etc.

I'm sorry, but in any modern interpretation, a pledge under duress would be considered null and void from the start. If your choices are between (A) pledge, and (B) die one way or another, that's blackmail. And honour was invariably twisted into just pretending to be totally devoted to whoever blackmailed you there.

And, yeah, sometimes it was disguised as duty "to the community", "to the country", "to God", and other such fine double-speak. Guess what? It invariably meant doing what that leader wanted done. It rarely had anything to do with the desires or aspirations of any other individual in that community.

So the medieval version isn't that far off from what it meant in ancient times too. In fact, it was just a continuation. In ancient Greece or Rome you'd be just as automatically pledged to be a soldier of whatever tyrant ruled your city state, and judged "honourable" or "dishonourable" by whether you bought a shield and spear and joined in their silly wars. That is, if you were born high enough to qualify as such. If not, it was your duty to stay and work the fields like a good slave.

In Rome, since you mention antiquity... well, go look the Cursus Honorum up some day. It was just a codified way to gain any political power, and started with ten years of military duty. (Although nepotism was considered normal, so a lot just followed a general relative around as an aide.) That's ancient age, you know.

Maybe you should pick up a dictionary or a thesaurus and learn that, lo and behold, you don't have to use the F-word every two sentences to get your point across. It just makes you sound like a 15-year old kid

If using the expression "fucked up" a couple of times offends you so much, I wonder... can you even manage to watch a movie, what with all that cursing and stuff? ;)

Less ethnocentrism and more scholarship is what we need.

Well, yes, bingo. We need more scholarship and less... uninformed idealists trying to rewrite human history to fit their utopian ideals. The fact is, history isn't nice at all. And I don't see what's to gain by pretending that it was a rose-tinted time with honourable warriors, rosy-cheeked peasants, and prosperous healthy craftsmen, all shiny-happy collectivist and honest too.