When Kevin
Warwick walks into his office, doors open, lights switch on, and a digitized voice says,
"Welcome, Professor Warwick." It also lets him know if he has e-mail and how
many messages there are. And his secretary can glance at a computer screen and instantly
find out where he is in the building, routing him a phone call or calling him for a
meeting as appropriate.
He could have created the same effects by tucking a smart card into the pocket of his tweed jacket. But by opting to implant a small (23 mm by 3 mm) silicon chip under his skin, Professor Warwick claims to have become the world's first cyborg--part man, part machine.
The human as computer had many applications, Professor Warwick said. "Possibilities could be that anyone who wanted access to a gun could do so only if they had one of these implants. Then if they try to enter a school or building that doesn't want them in there, the school computer would sound alarms and warn people inside or even prevent them having access.
"In five years' time, we will be able to do chips with all sorts of information on them. They could be used for money transfers, medical records, passports, driving licenses, and loyalty cards. If they are implanted they are impossible to steal. The potential is enormous," he said.
His daughter quips that he's crazy, and his wife says that the experiment "turns her stomach," but the soft-spoken chairman of the Cybernetics Department at the University of Reading in England doesn't sound like a send-up from a sci-fi convention.
"I come from a background of machine intelligence, looking at how intelligent machines are likely to be in the future," says Warwick. "There is a school of thought that says that the way humans can keep up with machines is to have silicon implants helping our intelligence, but it's been a bit science-fictiony. I thought technically we can go at least part of the way in that direction, so I went and had a go at it. What I can do now is fairly limited, but it shows some of the possibilities."
The idea of man empowered by digital ability has always raised ethical issues and deeper questions about what it means to be human. Those issues get tougher as the distinction between man and machine blurs.
When humans started interacting with computers in a box in the 1950s, they called them tools. When students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, started wearing their computers in recent years, they called themselves "cyborgs." Warwick's experiment brings the computer literally under the skin.
There are good reasons to do this, Warwick says: For example, such chips could connect up with the human nervous system and help people with disabilities. "Imagine yourself directly connected with a computer, with the memory capacity of that computer at your disposal. Imagine being able to visualize with X-rays, ultraviolet rays, ultrasonic rays, infrared rays--to see in every way that a computer can see: That's where the forefront of technology is," he says, in a phone interview.
MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has been studying how people interact with computers since the late 1970s. "The question of how you define the boundaries of the body have increasingly been on people's minds as they think about the computer, because people are beginning to sense that the computer is coming closer and closer to the skin," she says.
She finds that when people are asked what they would be comfortable implanting if they had a chip that communicates directly with the brain, many make a distinction between instrumental knowledge, such as calculus or foreign languages, and a course on music or Shakespeare. They'll accept the chip's take on how to speak German but not on how to understand Goethe.
Ms. Turkle said, "Implanting a chip is not very far from wearing it on your glasses or having it in your ear. We find it disturbing now, but the question is, will we find it disturbing in 10 years?"
Also to be resolved: What if the applications for close-to-the-skin computing turn out to be not so warm and fuzzy. Researchers at Reading warn that smart buildings could evolve into more than a cheery "good morning" for workers.
"Within businesses, individuals with implants could be clocked in and out of their office automatically," the University of Reading Web site states. "It would be known at all times exactly where an individual was within a building and whom they were with…. Is this what we want?"
Of course, no company would really want that kind of control over its staff. Or would it? The evidence suggests that your employer wants to know much, much more about you--enough to tap your phones, read your e-mail and video your movements.
In the US, research by the American Management Association has revealed that 40 percent of companies keep a log of their workers' phone calls while 16 percent videotape employees.
Under current legislation, companies are permitted "within reason" to place all employees under constant surveillance. They are free to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, censor e-mail, install spy cameras, even analyze urine in the toilets to detect drug use.