Technology Gone Wrong

Imagine that you've been in a car accident and you've been knocked unconscience. The paramedics arrive and take you too the hospital and roll you into the ER. The doctor takes out a PDA and holds it over your right hand. The PDA then transfers all your medical information from a tiny computer chip imbedded just under the skin.

Believe it or not this technology already exists. In fact, it's waiting for FDA approval as this article is being written. It's called a bioimplantable microchip.

This implant was created by altering a similar implant that’s used to track missing pets. It’s about the size of a grain of rice and is made to be implanted just below the skin on the top of your hand. It has enough memory to hold even the biggest medical files and can send those files to a device similar to a PDA.

Is that all they’ll be used for though?

Maybe one day they’ll have our credit card numbers stored on them to make buying our groceries easier. Stores could rig their “inventory control systems” to read the chips so the police could just go directly to the shoplifters house. We could even put all our banking information in them so that all we’d have to do is wave our hand at the ATM instead of remembering a bunch of PIN numbers.

Sounds like a good idea doesn’t it?

Yes it does, at least until you remember that this technology came from tracking devices. Who’s to say that the government wouldn’t use these chips to track our movements and use it as yet another way to increase their hold on us.

Think of all the laws that even the most law abiding citizen breaks on the average day. A little over the speed limit, an illegal U-turn, parking in a loading zone while you pick up just a few groceries. They’d be able to catch you for every last one of those infractions just by placing a receiver on every other corner. Just think of how your fines would add up.

Heaven forbid criminals get their hands on the receivers. You might as well tattoo your credit card number on your forehead.

The point of all this is that while it may start out being just for your medical information, it will eventually grow beyond that. They’ll be doing things with that little chip that nobody could possibly imagine right now. Just like they did with computers.

While all of these things that they do with this fun little device will start out being for the greater good, they will eventually come full circle to bite us in the butt. The atom bomb led to the Cold War, the Internet led to greatly increased rates of child abuse, and this will lead to something just as bad if not worse.