Slashdot Mirror
Human Chip Implant Info
CNN is currently running an article about the realities of human chip implant, and how soon it will come. Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading, had a chip implanted last Aug 24., and talks about the uses for chip implanting. Heck, I just want to be able to read my e-mail over my field of vision.
A lot of these comments are saying the same things: An implant that functions as a readily-available proximity ID badge is stupid!
That's not the point, folks. Of course there are better ways of doing that. This experiment serves to show that implants that perform more advanced functions can be done. People hearing about what he's done will start seeing that useful implants are right there on the horizon, hopefully furthering research into the area and helping people overcome the psychological issues surrounding the use of such things.
Imagine an implant reporting your medical status (blood sugar, blood pressure, perhaps heart rate, respiration, chemistry, etc.) at regular intervals. Information gathered this way could be immensely useful to you and your doctors.
Also, like stated in the article, implants could be used to augment or work with your nervous system to control prosthetics and devices in the external world (like computers, lights, doors, etc.).
There are hundreds and thousands of potential uses for this technology. Just because he's just using it as an ID badge doesn't mean the technology is worthless. Look at the big picture here, guys. This experiment just shows that computerized implants are realistic and feasible.
Sure, there are some usefull applications of this stuff, (wetdrives, replacing damaged nerve paths, and stuff from that previous article about the brain-sensors and implants.) but the demonstration this guy gave would be more likely to get applied in prisons for keeping track of prisoners and enforcing curfew.
Seriously, what does his chip do? It reports his location and ID to sensors in the building. Do you really want to be permanently stuck with something like that? I'd rather carry ID like that outside of my body, thanks.
Any chip that is implanted is certian to have IP rights owned by some big corp. Dealing with copyright and patenting laws in software is bad enought, I really don't want to deal with these kind of controls when it comes to my body. Further, if implanting chips becomes common it opens us up to a whole new era of surveillance and loss of privacy - it would be a trivial matter to put GPS (or whatever) into an implanted chip, and the NSA (or FBI, etc) will claim that they will only be used to find missing children.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0