Microchipped future proves we’re getting stupider
In the 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic, leading man Jack, a.k.a. Leonardo DiCaprio, gives his girlfriend, Rose, a.k.a. Kate Winslet, a dressing down after she refuses to escape a sinking Titanic on one of the vessel’s rare rescue boats because she wants to stay by his side.
“You’re so stupid!” Jack says, again and again, after Rose jumps from a descending lifeboat back onto the creaky, condemned ship.
And she is. They both are (everyone knows there was more than enough room on that floating door for two). But Jack may very well be talking to us — every member of the human race — because we are pretty stupid, too.
We are stupid because we learned about the sinking of the Titanic in school and saw James Cameron’s three-hour movie about it — yet some of us remain determined, like Rose, to give the doomed ocean liner a second chance.
The Titanic is officially getting a redo — not the movie, but the actual vessel. Thanks to Australian businessperson Clive Palmer, a modern replica of the Titanic is in the works and if all goes as planned, news emerged this week, the ship will set sail in 2022, and travel a route similar to the one the original ship took in 1912.
Unlike the original however, the new Titanic will have enough lifeboats for all on board, but wow, if there is a God, we really enjoy testing him. That, or the human race is determined to bring to life every catastrophe it sees on the big screen — and the small.
For additional proof that this is so, one need only look to Sweden where thousands of people appear intent on turning the sci-fi series Black Mirror into a terrifying reality.
According to a story in NPR this week, approximately 4,000 Swedes and counting have had microchips installed in their hands not by decree of a totalitarian government, but out of their own free will, presumably because they are too lazy to reach for their house keys.
The chips are roughly the size of a grain of rice and can be installed for $180 (U.S.), via syringe. Their purpose, according to the Facebook page of Biohax International, the company that is apparently leading the microchip market, is to provide the “carrier” — i.e. the human being walking around with a chip in his hand — the “opportunity of an efficient and seamless lifestyle with the aim to minimize friction and time loss in everyday life encounters.”
In English, this means the microchip is supposed to make life a little bit more convenient because people can use it to unlock their doors (all they have to do is swipe their hands over a chip reader as one would with a conventional key fob). The chip can also be used to exchange information.
“The chip basically solves my problems,” 28-year-old Szilvia Varszegi told NPR recently. Varszegi uses her chip at networking events in lieu of a business card or smartphone. All she has to do in order to give someone her LinkedIn info is touch their smartphone with her hand and voila — they have her info. Proponents of the technology hail it as won- derful because it eliminates a lot of life’s small, annoying tasks (fumbling around in your purse for your keys or your work pass). But critics of the chip wonder if compromising one’s privacy and ceding personal and physical information to a corporation is worth saving 30 seconds of wasted time.
It isn’t worth it. Neither is giving Amazon access to your home so that it can more efficiently deliver packages and, via Alexa, listen to your private conversations. And did engineering company Boston Dynamics really have to build a fleet of disturbingly nimble robot dogs, striking fear into the heart of anyone who has seen Terminator or Cujo?
Just because something is cool and doable doesn’t mean it must be done — and yet scientists and billionaires seem to operate under the opposite principle: if it’s cool and doable it absolutely must be done. Imagine though, if all of human ingenuity was channelled into solving problems that actually existed — climate change, starvation, cancer — instead of inventing a host of new ones? You’re right, it would be a bit of a bore. Titanic 2022, here I come.