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Florida: creepy, psychotic, and totally Star Trek
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By hikokigumo, Section Sci-Tech
Posted on Thu Apr 4th, 2002 at 09:27:24 AM PDT
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The Jacobs family, who hail from the much-discussed state of Florida, will become the first Americans to be implanted with VeriChips, the same tiny technology used to track lost pets. The version for humans also stores medical records.
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Because their son Jeff is unable to raise his head all the way and has other medical conditions, the parents are concerned he might "become sick and unable to speak for himself in an emergency". So they're all getting lost doggie chips, allowing them to be tracked by GPS.
How this is helpful I'm not sure, since I've never gone to the doctor and been asked whether there's any informational hardware implanted in my body. Moreover, if I were unable to speak, I doubt it would do any good if they did ask.
But maybe he doesn't need to go to the doctor. There's a company called Digital Angel that not only tracks your location with GPS, but tracks your bodily functions as well. And if those bodily functions get a little funky, they beam you straight to Sick Bay.
Personally, the aspect of the technology I find most frightening is this: if I can't find the correct drivers to allow my keyboard and my graphics tablet to co-exist on the same computer without painful hardware conflicts, what could happen to folks who try to combine a VeriChip with some cut rate pacemaker whose quality of tech support is equivalent to that of the Wacom company? They're fucked. That's what.
Not that I'm a Luddite. I'd just rather have not some technician in a basement somewhere watching my bio-readouts while I'm having sex or sitting on the toilet. But then, I can lift my head all the way up. |
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