Practical Or Dangerous? First Implanted Microchips Promise ‘To Make People’s Lives Easier’

This mights sound like a futuristic vision of the workplace, but at the Swedish start-up hub Epicenter, this is an almost daily routine.

The business offers its employees chips that get inserted into their hands. They are the size of rice grains that help them work faster. They can swipe cards, run printers, open doors, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.

In Sweden, implanted microchips have been noted for their popularity.

They aren’t that recent at all, actually. They have been on the market and used by businesses since 2014.

People in Sweden use them in all kinds of occasions, to move into their houses, workplaces, and gyms, to name a few. They are used to store contact information for emergencies, tickets for events, social media accounts, etc. They even take the train by using them.

Although some people, to say the least, are worried about a future with compulsory chip implants, other people see a massive opportunity lurking behind this technology.

This would involve replacing a work keycard – or not even just for work, but for entering your home building as well – or replacing the need for credit cards. In a shop, you just pick up the item you want and walk out.

However, experts said that the chip was not ready yet to perform money transactions, but maybe in the near future, they will develop them to that point.

In January 2015, Epicenter, which is home to more than 100 businesses and somewhere around – or even more than – 2,000 people working there, started implanting chips into their workers, voluntarily, of course.

Now, they’ve got about 150 employees with implants. A Belgium-based company also started offering these particular implants to their workers, and there are isolated cases around the world where engineering enthusiasts have been trying this on their own voluntarily just to see how it works in recent years.

Sources:
ktrh.iheart.com
orlandosentinel.com