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Hi-Tech Body Implants and the Biohacker Movement (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Body modification has been growing in popularity. It's pretty common to see people with multiple piercings or stretched earlobes (called gauging). With this wider acceptance has risen a specific subset of Biohacking that seeks to add technology to your body through implants and other augmentation. The commonly available tech right now includes the addition of a magnet in your fingertip, or an RFID chip in your hand to unlock doors and start your car. Cameron Coward looked into this movement — called Grinding — to ask what it's like to live with tech implants, and where the future will take us.
TFA goes on about putting magnets and RFID tags inside people as the state of the art. I'm sorry, something we do to our pets doesn't really get a 'hacking' imprimatur, much less 'high tech'.
Wake me up when somebody open sources the way to access human memory with a digital chip ('Microsofts in William Gibson's parlance'). Or making some drug or device that actually enhances the human condition. And no, splitting a tongue in half so you can move both muscles at the same time is not an 'enhancement'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Because a keyfob won't fit into hipster skinny jeans.
Yawn. Bio-electrical implants have been stable for decades, and there's really been no improvement over a few analog filters and a jack that sticks out of your head to connect the electronics to htat was used in the earliest designs. The "digital" modern versions with the embedded transceivers have a fraction of the battery life, they mistake digitization for actual signal quality, they *wildly* undersample audio to transmit power levels instead of preserving the mixed frequency original signals with all those time critical zero crossings for "plosive" sounds, they cost ridiculously more, and they're far more vulnerable to failures that force re-implantation, usually in the other ear.
I'm sure the tattoo / piercing shops are all over this, we have seen people that have had "horns" implanted in their scalp.
But I'm sorry, when I need a joint implant or some other othapeadic thing in my body to function, I'm not interested in some home-brew design executed on some 3D printer "god knows where".
RFID implants aside, just about all the other ideas scare the hell out of me. There *will* be a down side, and when your implant goes south, do you plan on taking some random tattoo joint to court to pay for the loss of whatever it is you lose?
These people do not carry malpractice insurence, and it's unlikly they could get it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Funny that you mention that. Last night at the theater, there was a guy who kept getting texts on his iPhone during the movie. I was thinking of how much longer before I embedded his iPhone in his head. His girlfriend finally took his phone away and turned it off. I thanked her on the way out.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've wondered about the dentures / false teeth. You've now got a pretty decent sized chunk of plastic you carry around in your mouth almost at all awake times, but what would you even want to embed in it? I could use to have a bright LED I could turn on, a mouth flashlight LOL. What else though?
Teens and the few adults who found a good job or career where it didn't matter will tell you how wrong you are.
Most of those teens will not join the ranks of those few adults.