German biohacker and transhumanist Tim Cannon may be the first known human to implant a computer chip capable of transmitting biometrical data to an android device.
During an interview with Motherboard Magazine, the “Circadia 1.0,” an open-source device capable of recording and transmitting body temperature over Bluetooth, was successfully implanted into Cannon’s left forearm.
Built by Cannon and his business associates at Grindhouse Wetware, a company focused on “merging man and machine,” the large chip was implanted by body modifier Steve Haworth without the use of anesthesia. The battery powered device, enclosed in a protective case, is charged wirelessly through the use of a charging coil placed against the skin.
“Instead of taking snapshots of your health by visiting a doctor, you can aggregate weeks or months of medical data that you can store for your personal viewing. Messages, warnings, or texts from your android phone to Circadia implant can be displayed via LEDs through your skin,” the device description reads.
Cannon says the device will allow him to study what causes his temperature to fall or rise, with a later upgrade configuration allowing text messages to be sent if his temperature begins reaching 100 degrees °F.
Chip capable of transmitting biometrical data to an android device.
“The human body is really really failing in almost every way,” Cannon says. “I want to live to be thousands of years old. I don’t want to die. I don’t know why anybody would.”
Leaders in the transhumanist movement such as Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil predict that the human body will be completely replaced by machines by the end of the century, with human minds uploaded to computers by the year 2045.
Others such as Russian millionaire Dmitry Itskov believe that immortality through placing human brains in controllable robot bodies, also referred to as the “singularity,” will be reached in as little as 25 years.
During the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York last June, Kurzweil laid out his predictions of the march towards singularity in detail.
“We’re going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more. In fact the non-biological part – the machine part – will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part, Kurzweil said. “So even if that biological part went away it wouldn’t make any difference.”
While the push towards immortality is praised by some, many see a much darker outcome, with such future technologies controlled by a wealthy few as average humans become increasingly irrelevant to the “transhumanist utopia.”
“While everyone would welcome some of the technological advancements predicted by Kurzweil, most notably the virtual elimination of all diseases, his fixation with cheating death by achieving technological singularity has several dark spiritual and practical overtones that have not been properly debated,” Infowars writer Paul Joseph Watson notes. “Moral considerations are once again being cast aside in the feverish pursuit of technological progress at all costs.”
The U.S. government now plans to spend $70 million over the next five years to fund the Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies project, a surgically implanted brain pacemaker that will monitor the mental health and brainwaves of soldiers and veterans in real time.
