IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 6

EDITORIAL

Katina Michael

or over 20 years, MG
Michael and I have
been researching the
social implications
of m icroch ippi ng
people. In 1996 as part of a final
year major project in my Bachelor
of Information Technology degree
at the University of Technology,
Sydney, I researched the potential
for government identifiers to be im-
planted in the human body, with
supervisor Prof. Jenny Edwards [1].
Influenced greatly by the early
works of Roger Clarke [2] and Simon
Davies [3] in Australia, I became
especially interested in "where to
next?" A single image I had come
across in the Library of Andersen
Consulting headquarters in North
Sydney while in my cooperative em-
ployment semester in April 1996,
has stuck with me ever since. Depict-
ed in a cartoon figure was the body
of a man, with a computer "head."
No eyes, no ears, just a blank cath-
ode ray tube (CRT). The headline of
that report read: "The Human Meta-
phor" [4]. In December of that year I
found myself working as a graduate
engineer at Nortel Networks.
In 1997 Eduardo Kac became
the first human to implant himself
with a non-medical device in the
performance art work titled "Time
Capsule" [5]. After injecting an
implant above his left ankle, Kac
went on to register himself on a pet
database. This performance piece

F

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2742238
Date of publication: 7 September 2017

6

Go "Get Chipped"
A Brief Overview of Non-Medical
Implants between 1997-2013 (Part 1)
was streamed live on the Internet.
One year later in 1998 the company
I worked for sponsored the Cyborg
1.0 project at the University of
Reading and continued support for
Cyborg 2.0, alongside Tumbleweed
Communications, Computer Asso-
ciates, and Fujitsu [6]. I learned of
this cyborg project through the com-
pany's global hardcopy newspaper.
I remember sitting at my desk turn-
ing to the back page and reading a
short column about how implanta-
bles were destined to be our future.
At the time I had begun a Ph.D. on
the topic of "Smart Card Innova-
tion in Government Applications,"
but quickly redirected my focus to
holistically study major automatic
identification innovations, inclusive
of chip implants. Dr. Ellen McGee
and Dr. Gerald Q. Maguire, Jr., had
begun to research ethical and poli-
cy issues around implantable brain
chips as early as 2001, but I was
more preoccupied in how this tech-
nology could be used for everyday
banking and telecommunications
applications as a blackbox implant-
able in the arm or upper torso.
Prof. Kevin Warwick had become
the first academic to be implanted
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

with a cylindrical transponder that
not only identified him but also
located him in his building [7].
After rigging up the corridors of the
Cybernetics Department at the Uni-
versity of Reading, an interactive
map would locate Warwick as he
walked throughout the building. His
office was also rigged up with read-
ers, so that his presence was some-
what ambient - as he walked into
the room, the lights would switch
on and his computer would turn
on to his favorite webpage. In 1999
British Telecom's Peter Cochrane
∕

SEPTEMBER 2017
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