Implanting Digital Data in Humans

Once the province of spy fiction and darkly suggestive futuristic science fiction, the technology once used only to implant identifying information in domestic animals is now being used to contain medical and other personal information. With the right kind of scanner, anyone can know anything about you on that little digital chip. Does this seem like a good idea or more like a step into the dark future of "Brave New World"?

I am a technology fan. I love trying new innovations and enjoy many of the newer software and hardware options currently available. On the other hand, I am a moderately sentient and modestly cautious person who is not unaware of risks. This combination of proclivities that I believe I share with a good many others, leads me to have some concerns and questions about what we are sometimes a tad too quick to regard as "technological progress."

Some new technologies have proven to be great benefits to humankind and others have proven to be curses. The jury is still out on some like Cloud Technology.

There is virtually no way to limit the type of data that can be stored on a digital chip and the smaller they are, the easier (and less expensive) they are to surgically insert into the human body. Additionally, there is no way of firmly and categorically securing that data from someone who has access to technology of a similar degree of sophistication. Financial, medical and any other personal data can be stored on such a device.

There most certainly could be benefits, but there are also important risks to be considered.

Some rather sobering current examples include scanners that thieves can walk by you with which read and capture the data on that black strip on the back sides of the credit cards in your wallet The risk increases as what is called RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology becomes more internationally prevalent as a way to store your information on the credit cards.

Now, the technology actually exists to put micro-chips into the human body without surgery '" Using only a syringe! Some states have actually gone ahead and passed legislation prohibiting the involuntary insertion of such micro-chips whether for tracking or data storage purposes. Does such an implant render us a cyborg-hybrid? Are we certain that this an idea that will advance humanity in a positive and desirable direction?

There are many good uses for such technology. Complete medical histories being available immediately to treating staff in a hospital Emergency Department can surely save lives. However, as is the case with most technologically created things, a thoughtful cost-benefit analysis must be performed by people who have nothing to gain, monetarily or politically, from the use of a new device.

In the modern world where people tend to be awed by increased power in decreased size and by the ability to capture and store almost unlimited data, personal or otherwise, it is sometimes difficult to persuade otherwise sentient people that just because something is possible, it is, on careful analysis, not necessarily a good idea to implement.

Groups like the Progressive Luddite Society have been formed over the past decades to bring together who share the need to carefully and deliberately consider this question.

Technology just may be one of the most dramatic examples of humankind's ability to create being more highly developed than our ability to manage that which we have created. Mary Shelly captured this idea wonderfully in "Frankenstein" and in more modern times, our experience with nuclear energy makes much the same point. Increasingly, there is concern being expressed from both social and academic points of view that increasing sophisticated communications and data storage technology parallels that situation in that human consciousness does not seem to be up to safely managing the potential.

Technology has certainly brought us many useful advances and tools, some of which it would be difficult to imagine living without. Not every new thing is, however, necessarily, taking humankind in a healthy or thoughtfully positive direction. Discretion and self-control need to be a part of the algorithm that is used to determine what may be an important difference between what we CAN do and what it is GOOD for us to do.

My father used to say, "A word to the wise is sufficient." Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Time will tell.