Get up, go to work. Wave my hand at the car, which unlocks the door and starts the engine. Off to the office, wave at the entry door, which opens and lets me in. Walk to Starbucks, push Venti Chai Latte, wave again, triggering electronic payment, and wait for my Latte.

It’s 2018. 200 employees at Epicenter in Sweden have had a microchip injected into the flesh beside their thumb. So do 50 of Three Square Market’s employees in River Falls, Wisconsin. The chips contain information that can be read by NFC (Near Field Communication) devices, and are similar to the chips in contactless cards, such as credit cards, in passports, your pets ID microchip, car keys, etc.

But don’t get ahead of the systems. Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow (real name) implanted the chip from Sydney’s public transit system into his hand, so he could speed up his commute. He was fined for travelling without a valid ticket as well as tampering with the card.

Thank goodness these embedded chips are relatively benign, mostly only holding a string of 2,000 random characters and readable only in close proximity to the reader. But, you can be tracked anywhere that a reader is placed. How long did you spend at your desk, how many bathroom breaks did you take, who do you spend time talking to, how often do you leave the office, and where do you go? The chips are, for example, able to

• store health data
• provide access to secure areas
• login to various systems
• make cashless payments
• access and manage home systems.

Although these chips are made from non-organic material, it has been 5 years since scientists created the first purely biological transistor that was made entirely of genetic material, opening the way to programming living cells.

Many people don’t see much difference from other NFC and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices), such as your cell phone, and which can already be used to track your movements. Many will see the convenience of being able to operate without external devices such as cash/cards, keys, IDs. More so as technology advances to where the line between being human and becoming cyborg is crossed. Or has it already been crossed. Implants have already been used by William Dobelle, to provide, albeit limited, vision in blind people. Kevin Warwick (aka Captain Cyborg) was able to connect himself to the internet and control a robot arm, not physically connected to him, and which he was able to make mimic the motions of his own arm. He also was able to connect to his wife’s nervous system through implants in her arms. The artist, Neil Harbisson, has a head implant and extension that provides an augmented perception of vision; he was completely color blind but now can hear colors. The hardware, software, and his brain have “united” to provide an extra sense.

We can all laud the possibilities in restoring body parts and functions as well as enhancing these and indeed any physical and mental capabilities. Technology is advancing so quickly, that the next 20 years will be the most exciting time we have ever witnessed. But for many, this could also be the most terrible and frightening experience. Why has Elon Musk said that “AI is much more dangerous than nukes”? And why does Stave Huffman (co-founder and CEO of Redditt) think that upwards of 50% of Silicon valley billionaires have acquired hideaways in the US or some other remote location – most recently Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and destroyer of Gawker) obtained Citizenship in New Zealand and acquired a 477 acre former sheep farm in the sparsely populated South Island, and a house in Queensland with a panic room. Underground bunkers are a big business in remote New Zealand.

We have all read the recent information about Cambridge Analytics ability to “purchase”, without permission, the Facebook data of 50 million US users; and to use that to create psychographic profiles – information about the user’s personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles – that were used to predict location specific voter behavior, and create a targeted campaign for the Donald Trump platform that manipulated voter behavior. Truth is, our data is not safe, and we are all being manipulated in one way or another.

When you apply for a job, credit, insurance, college, become eligible for parole or are being sentenced, or are just looking at your facebook page, computer models are being used to make judgements that can affect the rest of your life. These judgements are based on choices that are usually opaque to the people who use them to make the actual decisions; only the programmers, with their frailties, prejudices, biases, know what went into the model. As Artificial Intelligence becomes increasingly and ultimately independent of people, no human will understand how decisions were reached.

And you think you can hide? It isn’t only chips that will help track us. CCTV is already ubiquitous in many countries, used by both Government and private businesses (in the US most surveillance is still private). Until now, these systems were not good at facial recognition, but that is rapidly changing. China and Russia already widely use facial recognition systems, and it’s coming to a camera near you. As Axis Communication says, “whether you wish to recognize, identify or verify a person, a camera with facial recognition software is an efficient solution”. Matching takes place in real time.

Lufthansa has just successfully trialed facial recognition kiosks that cross check your photo against the Customs and Border Protection database as well as Amadeus and Vision Box (the airline booking system and the system that compares headshots).  No need to get a boarding pass or present passports. And between chips and CCTV, nowhere to run and hide.

So where to now? Are we headed to Utopia; the anarchic syndicalist society of Anarres (The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, 1974) or an idyllic life built on egalitarian principles (City of the Sun by Tomasso Campanela 1623 or the recent block buster movie Black Panther, based on Marvel Comics.)

Or Dystopia. The Brave New World of Aldous Huxley (1932), where economic chaos and unemployment have caused the creation of an international scientific empire that manufactures its citizens in the laboratory on a eugenic basis, sex now being redundant. And where taking Soma means everyone is content with the caste system they have been assigned to under their eugenic creation. Will it be the Stand on Zanzibar of John Brunner (1968); maybe this rings a bell – corporate interests seek control over the economies of developing nations, the populace is consumed by mass media, school shootings are in the news, and extremes of poverty and wealth are everywhere. Or the worlds of the new and popular the Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008-2010, Divergent (Veronica Roth, 2011-2013), and many more. Hint: Dystopian worlds are far more numerous than Utopian ones.

One or the other is fast approaching. Much faster than I had realized.

In 1770, Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher, said, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle”. Followed in 1867 by John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher, “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.

Some thoughts: What profession am I in? What would I want my children and their children to be looking at for a compelling future? Can I save my privacy? Can I avoid being manipulated? What can I do to influence our future?

To be continued