Thursday, February 2, 2006

NYT on RFID implants

Today's New York Times fashion section features an article about people who are choosing to be implanted with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips, a trend that BB readers are quite familiar with. (Previous links here, here, and here.) The article also includes some insights from my Institute for the Future colleague Alex Pang. However, Amal Graafstra is incorrectly identified as the "first known person to independently have himself implanted with a chip" in 2005. Technology artist Eduardo Kac did it in a well-publicized project in 1997 and UK professor Kevin Warwick was implanted the following year as documented in this Wired cover story. From the NYT article:

People who feel naked without their cellphones, who carry around a set of keys with storage devices like flash drives that contain their digital life, who have their entire music collection on an iPod, have already created an information envelope around themselves, said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.

"They are living a life in which they have a symbiotic relationship with communication technologies that are as familiar a part of the body as braces or glasses," Mr. Pang said. "For these people, the idea of putting an RFID tag in themselves is no stranger than putting in fillings."

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:31:08 PM