Microchips implanted under the skin? The Swedes are doing it!
Impossible, right? What person in their right mind would want to be tracked 24/7? What about thieves? (Ouch) Surely my friend was joking, or misinformed?
In two seconds she had whipped out her (trackable) iphone and Googled (also trackable) several sites (Cookies). If Telegraph, Guardian, Business Insider, LA Times, and Washington Post are to be believed, some Swedish employees are getting microchipped "to open doors, operate printers or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand". Yes, the effort of swiping a card was too much work (the rummaging, the lifting, the swiping, the putting away again). Better, apparently, to be a cyborg.
While across Europe political thinkers worry about the threat of populism and authoritarian movements, Sweden is leading the way into the kind of techology that sci-fi writers have only nightmared about.
“Of course, putting things into your body is quite a big step to do, and it was even for me at first,” LA Times quoted an initially hesitant employee as saying. “On the other hand, I mean, people have been implanting things into their body, like pacemakers and stuff to control your heart,” he said. “That's a way, way more serious thing than having a small chip that can actually communicate with devices.”
About 150 people at a company called Epicenter have agreed to have the technology which LA Times compared to that of contactless credit cards, implanted. About the size of a grain of rice. And hackable, of course.
Oh brave new world that has such cyborgs in it!
sources:
Companies start implanting microchips into workers' bodies - LA Times
