BYTE.com > Editorial and Opinion > 2002
FDA Approves Cyberpunk Future
By Shannon Cochran
April 8, 2002
(FDA Approves Cyberpunk Future
: Page 1 of 1 )
The technology envisioned by science-fiction writers in novels such as
William Gibson's Neuromancer (Ace Books, 1995), which will
someday allow us to connect our computers directly to our brains,
cleared its first legal hurdle last week when the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration announced that it would not seek to block implantable
microchips in the U.S. market.
All right, so the actual product in question—the VeriChip from
Applied Digital Solutions—is actually fairly prosaic, closer to a
barcode than a brainjack. It doesn't do anything other than hold a
verification number, which a specially built scanner can read via radio
frequency signals. Applied Digital Solutions intends that number to
correspond to more detailed personal data stored in "an FDA-compliant
secure data storage site," accessible over the Internet.
It's clear that the implantable chips are really just a design tweak to
a preexisting system; people with special medical conditions have been
wearing ID bracelets for decades. But there's something about the chips
that spooks people. "The subjects of an implant may have little control
over the data it holds. It's easy to imagine that the implantation of
the device will one day become compulsory," warned John Leyden in an
article for The Register. Many others echo his fears, apparently
not considering that such a tyrannous society wouldn't need to rely on
these chips; the danger of compulsory ID has existed as long as tattoos
and nonremovable jewelry.
I go through every day with a kind of low-grade frustration in the
barriers that separate me from my technology. In the few seconds that my
laptop takes to boot, or that it takes to navigate a field of menus on
my cell phone, I feel cheated of my neural Internet interface. The really
exciting work is happening in laboratories; researchers at Brown
University, for example, recently announced they had given a BYTE.com > Editorial and Opinion > 2002
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