#It feels like in the dystopian future where you put your microchip in and they give you your daily allotment of slop and it comes out of a

[frascospecimen]

I don’t fucking understand the boycott fatigue at all like are you telling me you people actively enjoy going to McDonald’s. Hello

[newstfionline]

Would You Let Your Boss Put a Chip in Your Body?

Guy Clapperton, Medium, Jul 16, 2018

Dave Coplin is trying to explain to me why people across two continents are suddenly allowing their employers to put microchips under their skin.

“I do this to my dog--why wouldn’t I do it to myself?” Coplin says. I’m not convinced, so he launches into an anecdote about a club on the Mediterranean party island of Ibiza where people could chip themselves and then use the chip to buy drinks. Coplin suspects this was because they weren’t wearing many clothes.

But chipping yourself because you’re half-naked and don’t have a pocket for your wallet is very different from allowing your employer to chip you. So, how did we get here?

Coplin, who heads a consultancy called the Envisioners, says there are real benefits for both employer and employee--if we can only get over our squeamishness. “If it adds value, I’m all for it,” he says. “Today we look at people doing it and it feels a bit weird, but in reality there is something inevitable about it.”

Patrick McMullan is president of Three Square Market in Wisconsin. After following experiments at Swedish incubator Epicenter in Stockholm, which has been experimenting with chipping since 2015, his company decided to develop the technology further. Naturally, as a supplier and a developer, McMullan has a chip implant himself--one roughly the size of a grain of rice implanted under the skin between his thumb and index finger. It’s based on near-field communication (NFC) technology--the same chips that are used in contactless credit cards or mobile payments. Implants are done quickly and simply with a syringe and very little blood.

One current limitation, McMullan says, is that because the chip is a passive device, there is no way it can be tracked. For now, that means the chip is for accessing the building, logging into computers, and paying for things from the canteen. But McMullan’s employees are on a mission “to change the world,” he says, and more than 70 of them so far have volunteered to be part of the experiment.

The idea seems to be spreading. In addition to Three Square Market, at least 160 people have been chipped at Epicenter’s monthly “chipping parties.” Several staff members at CityWatcher.com, a surveillance company in Cincinnati, have gotten chips, as have some at a digital marketing company in Belgium called NewFusion. No doubt it’s good publicity, but chipping advocates genuinely believe this will become common practice over the next decade.

Chips will offer more benefits as the technology progresses, McMullan believes. “We are developing medical uses that will monitor vital signs. Doctors will be able to proactively treat patients rather than always react,” he says. McMullan believes the numbers of chipped employees worldwide will reach millions over a few years because the benefits of a sub-$100 chip are potentially huge.

McMullan sees no downside, despite obvious concerns that it feels perfectly dystopian to be intimately connected to your employer in a way that is hard to control or remove. Take his own idea of chips monitoring people’s health: There is obvious advantage in future embedded technologies that could monitor cholesterol, blood sugar levels, or even just dehydration.

But what if someone had a chip to monitor alcohol intake as part of an agreement to quit? Would a surgeon be allowed to refuse to operate? Could an insurance company hike the patient’s premiums if they fell off the wagon? The question of what information could or should be gathered and where it could or should go will become far more complex as chips become more advanced and more widespread. And other experts have raised concerns about hacking, as well as known health problems already associated with similar chips used in pets.

“Obviously, privacy is a massive concern,” Coplin adds. “What will people do with the data? Who’s going to see it? In practical terms, it’s bad enough that I have to carry my phone around with me, and my wallet. If this gets around some of that, I’m up for it.”

Despite the concerns, many people seem to accept it’s going to happen--and quite rapidly. Lynda Shaw, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of Your Brain Is Boss, believes chipping is a natural progression that is likely to be more acceptable to young people.

In some ways, this is already an established technology, at least among people with health problems. We already use chips for cochlear implants and even for bypassing parts of the brain in the event of brain damage, Shaw points out. “Chipping the human body is not news, but there’s always the sinister side of us that says this is a bit too Orwellian,” she says. People might become worried about computer viruses living in their bodies or about what happens when and if the hardware becomes corrupted.

Rohit Talwar, futurist and CEO of the think tank Fast Future, sees chipping becoming widespread very quickly, particularly among tech companies that want to demonstrate they are forward thinking.

Chipping will also be used, Talwar says, among companies “who want very high security so people don’t get into systems or part of the building they shouldn’t, and who want to demonstrate to clients that they’re cutting edge in security terms. You might also see it being used as a way of enabling people to exchange money in canteens, vending machines--it will get rid of identity passes.”

Shaw sees benefits as well. If someone is ill and has a pacemaker or uses anticoagulant medication, making that information available with a quick scan could save their life. But she also points to darker implications for crime scenes. In regions where the crime rate is high and bodies turn up dismembered, Shaw notes that a criminal wouldn’t need the whole body to breach security, just the limb in which a chip had been embedded. “You could end up inadvertently inciting a more horrible crime than the one originally being contemplated,” she says.

Talwar’s view is that dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. A generation born as digital natives might see this as a natural evolution and plastic passes as old-fashioned, arcane, and certainly not able to capture the kind of information that a chip inside our bodies could capture about, say, health.

“Older generations may see this as terribly invasive,” Talwar says. “I was at an event last year where they were chipping people just for fun, and the lines were going down the corridor of people waiting to be chipped--for the story and for the experience.”

So, where is chipping going? Talwar sees it as part of an inevitable process in which those who are pioneers have said for some time that if humans are going to keep up with artificial intelligence, we will have to enhance our brains and bodies.

“This is just the start point of that process. You could easily predict your mobile phone memory being inserted into you, chips to accelerate your memory and your brain,” Talwar says. “We could see a massive acceleration in this as we move into enhancing and augmenting ourselves and stepping into the world of transhumanism.”

Coplin sees chipping as part of a dialogue about how we relate to machines. He notes that one man in Australia who tried removing the chip from a travel card and embedding it in his hand failed because the terms and conditions said not to deface the card. “At the moment, it feels weird,” Coplin says, “but at the moment, I might have a device on my wrist that might have that technology. Why not a little further under my skin?”

Society has always contested the potential of technology and the changes it forces. A quarter-century ago, few people predicted the advent of mobile phones--fewer still anticipated that we’d use them as cameras and music centers. And now there are additional pressures on technologies.

“We’ve really lost trust with the people who handle our data--the banks, the Googles, the Facebooks,” Coplin says. “Until that trust is won back, we’re going to be very fearful of this kind of thing. And I think that’s a real shame because of the benefits we could have.”

[newstfionline]

Why You Will One Day Have A Chip In Your Brain

Steven Levy, Wired, July 5, 2017

Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope. Now, the brain computer interface is suddenly the hot new thing in tech. This spring, Elon Musk started a new company, Neuralink, to do it. Facebook, at its F8 developer’s conference, showed a video of an ALS patient typing with her brain. But earlier to the game was Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who in 2013 made a bundle by selling his company, Braintree, to Paypal for $800 million. Last year, he used $100 million of that to start Kernel, a company that is exploring how to build and implant chips into the skulls of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s patients to reprogram their neural networks to restore some of their lost abilities.

But helping to restore a damaged brain is only an entry point for Kernel. Johnson, a 39-year-old from Utah, is looking forward--with almost unseemly enthusiasm--to the day that healthy people can get neural augmentation. He has emerged as one of the most eloquent evangelists of reinventing the human brain. Needless to say, this effort raises lots of questions--the very questions I raised to him in a conversation recently. Read it and make your own decision--albeit with your obsolete, unmodified brain.

Steven Levy: Why do you want to put in a chip in the brain?

Bryan Johnson: The next frontier of human aspiration is inside our brains. We currently understand the world through our sensory mechanisms, and we will find thousands or millions of Everests as we unlock our brains.

We’ve run out of Everests, and now we have to make them up?

I look at the current set of things that I could potentially do, and I would like more options.

These are things you would like to do but you feel constrained because your brain isn’t powerful enough?

Yes, I feel incredibly constrained in my current configuration. In my ability to process information, to remember it, to consume it, to think about it. Even my imagination--in my ability to contemplate things I’m unfamiliar with. I can only imagine things I’m familiar with.

Couldn’t some of these concerns be addressed by humans working in concert with machine intelligence, without having to change our own brains?

Let me ask you this: What does the human race look like in 50 years or 100 years from now? What does it mean to be a human?

I don’t know the answer. Maybe my brain’s too small.

Humans currently reign supreme on planet Earth, because we are the most powerful form of intelligence. So therefore, we decide who we eat, who we have as pets, who we allow to go extinct, who is saved, who is neutered, who can reproduce. We are currently developing a new form of intelligence in the form of AI that is increasingly capable, whether it’s conscious or not. For humans to be relevant in a matter of decades there is no choice other than to unlock our brains and intervene in our cognitive evolution. If you try to imagine a world where we are happy 30, 40, 50 years from now, there is no version of that future where we have not been able to figure out how to read and write our neural code.

Seriously, what convinces you that we can “unlock” the brain and make ourselves superhumanly smart?

I don’t have any degree of confidence in our success. That’s the most intellectually honest [answer] I could give. Society says that the brain is incredibly complex. But we haven’t previously had the tools to properly probe it, so we don’t know. We might make breakthroughs of fundamental understanding within 5, 10 years.

You’ve said that one thing that might be beneficial for humanity would be to alter our brains to do more positive things. Like not going to war--would our brains be restructured to reduce hostility?

All of those become options. I want that to become an option.

Changing our brains to alter our feelings sounds dystopian to me. Haven’t you seen Black Mirror?

I have. This is the emotional experience we always have with emerging technology. When most people encounter this, they have the same visceral response: “That’s scary. I feel uncomfortable. I like myself just the way I am.” As people warm up to the idea, they marinate in it and contemplate the other factors at play. Why do we think that what we have is so sacred? Why do we think that we are the holy standard at this point in time and that to change the configuration needs some massive justification? Isn’t humanity a constant effort to change ourselves, through things like meditation? Are we not just inherently dissatisfied with ourselves?

But if some people raise their abilities by brain augmentation, wouldn’t people who don’t change be at a disadvantage? They might not be able to compete in education, in jobs, and even in cocktail conversation. So it really wouldn’t be a choice, would it?

Well, how do you feel about some people getting a private education and other people being stuck in inner city schools?

I don’t feel great about it.

So it’s already happening. People somehow think that a cognitive improvement is something new to the scene. It’s not. We just simply have different forms. A private education is a form of enhancement. Humans always do whatever they can to maximize their well being. If we simply add technology to the brain, it’s a continuation of what humans have always done. Now, my hope is that we can build technology that would be accessible for billions. But the point is, this is not a new problem.

So when is your best guess of when you might have a computer chip in your head?

It depends on the type of technology and it depends on whether nation-states would allow an elective process, instead of me having to have the burden of some type of dysfunction or disease. So, if I have a healthy brain, when could I get this? I would say within 9-10 years.

It seems to me that you’re really talking about a pivot in human activity, from a biological evolutionary pace into something which skyrockets it into a supercharged artificial evolution path that changes what “human” is.

Exactly. We are now in the era of self-directed evolution. Genetically, biologically, neurologically, and physically. I’m just waiting for a nation-state to raise its hand and say, “We are the home for human potential. Bring your technologies and let’s do it.”

Are there any nation-states thinking about that now?

I’ve had a couple of conversations in confidence, and I would say there’s more interest than a lot of people realize. When it comes to a nation-state’s competitiveness, [I think] that once this starts breaking it’s going to break fast.