Toogood Reports [Weekender, March 3, 2002; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/It had to happen. A company is now seeking approval to manufacture and market computer chips that would be implanted in humans as a form of identification and to store health information. But the new technology presents us with more questions than it answers. Will it be used simply for security reasons at nuclear and government facilities, or will its intended purpose be to track us, making it nothing more than a LoJack system for humans?
More than likely though, knowing the reliability of computer technology, the things will malfunction often, twice as much if the government gets involved and tries to make them malfunction less. Having Uncle Sam involved in building these things is one way to ensure that they're the most poorly acting chips since Eric Estrada and Larry Wilcox. Malfunction will lead to its downfall, not malicious intent. Despite everyones fears of abuse and misuse, here's how it will probably work.
You or your company pays $200 to Applied Digital Solutions to load a tiny computer chip, about the size of a grain of rice, with all of your personal data. Then a doctor puts the chip into a large needle and injects it just under your skin. You´re all set, they tell you, to enter any of your company´s secure locations, and in the event you´re injured, hospital personnel will be able to know your blood type, complete medical history, and most importantly your insurance carrier, all with a simple scan.
As you go to work that morning, you approach the security checkpoint and wait behind two or three others passing their hands underneath a scanner. When it´s your turn, you run your hand underneath the scanner, but it just beeps in error. It´s not recognizing you. Your computer chip has crashed. “Darn that Windows 98” you yell out as the guard, skillfully utilizing his 3 months experience and 6th grade education, figures you must be an imposter and brains you with the butt of his holster, which would have contained a gun, but it would seem he´s misplaced it.
The guard, noticing that you´re severely injured and can‘t move, leaves you there to make his hourly rounds. After a few minutes a passerby sees you and calls an ambulance. When the paramedics arrive, they load you into the ambulance and look for your identification. You´re not carrying any. The paramedics figure that since you don´t have I.D. of any sort, you must have an implanted chip. They scan your hand, and their scanning device beeps in error. You´re badly in need of blood, but your blood type was on the chip. As you arrive at the hospital, your unconscious self is loaded onto a gurney and wheeled into the emergency room where you are met by a well fed nurse who thinks the dental program co-pays are exorbitantly high and as a result hasn´t had her teeth cleaned since the Carter administration. Along with Altoids and a personality, she´s in need of your health insurance information. She scans your arm. “His chip crashed,” says one of the paramedics as he looks down at you, shaking his head in pity.
The nurse fumbles through your pants looking for your wallet, spending an unprofessional amount of extra time in your front pockets. You don´t have a wallet because everything was on the chip. You were happy because you didn´t have to carry anything anymore. You were happy because technology was saving you an extraordinary amount of inconvenience. You were certain that having the chip implanted would make your life easier, and in fact extend the length of your life. All these things are mentioned in your eulogy.
You may consider the above scenario to be far fetched, but don´t speak too quickly. As a matter of fact, it´s probably too conservative. The manufacturer tells us that the chip would be put to good use as a medical tool and just a form of electronic identification, but others feel that the chip is just a stones throw from being used for invasion of privacy reasons. Critics of this technology say that, like with many things, the original intention may be good, but it will only lead to an intrusion on civil liberties. People whose job it is to come up with impressive sounding names for stuff call this “function creep.”
Who´s right? As always, the people whose job it is to stomp on our constitutional rights will decide — The Federal Government. Like asking the chickens at Kenny Rogers Roasters how they´d like to be cooked, the government will ask us how we feel about this issue, and then do what they knew they would do in the first place. They´ll probably even buy the rights to the technology from Applied Digital Solutions for, say, $4 billion, provided that Applied Digital agrees to donate 5% of that to charity and rename their building after Robert Byrd.
If we all had a computer chip implanted in us, would the government use it to keep track of us? Of course they would. But just as fast as we get implanted with micro-chips, people will come up with ways to counterfeit them or fool the scanning device, which will force the government to appropriate another few billion (with of course $1 billion of that going for a new expressway named after Robert Byrd) to come up with a system that can´t be counterfeited, which will be another couple of chips to verify that the original chip is there, and before you know it we´ll be so computerized that one day on your drive to work you´ll notice that we all look like C3PO with road rage.
Applied Digital Solutions is based in Palm Beach, Florida, so I assume that they´ll first try out the implanted computer chips on some of the residents of southern Florida. Or maybe they have and we´ve unknowingly discovered its first side-effect — it makes you unable to negotiate the simplest of voting ballots.
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