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FUTURE HUMAN
Would You Let Your Boss Put a Chip in Your Body?
A small number of employees are agreeing to subcutaneous implants — and the idea is spreading
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 a 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.
“I do this to my dog — why…
