Why You’re Probably Getting a Microchip Implant Someday
When Patrick McMullan first heard in early 2017 that thousands of Swedish citizens were unlocking their car doors and turning on coffee machines with a wave of their palm, he wasn’t too impressed. Sure, the technology—a millimeters-long microchip equipped with near-field communication capabilities and lodged just under the skin—had a niche, cutting-edge appeal, but in practical terms, a fob or passcode would work just as well.
McMullan, a 20-year veteran of the tech industry, wanted to do one better—to find a use for implantable microchips that was genuinely functional, not just abstractly nifty. In July 2017, news cameras watched as more than 50 employees at Three Square Market, the vending-solutions company where McMullan is president, voluntarily received chip implants of their own. Rather than a simple scan-to-function process like most of Sweden’s chips use, the chips and readers around Three Square Market’s River Falls, Wisconsin, office were all part of a multistage feedback network. For example: Your chip could grant you access to your computer—but only if it had already unlocked the front door for you that day. “Now,” McMullan says of last summer, “I’ve actually done something that enhances our network security.”
The problem McMullan’s chips cleverly solve is relatively small-scale—but of commercial microchip implants, with a slew of originative health features that could serve as the best argument yet that microchips’ benefits can outweigh our anxieties about them.
