Chipping In

‘Nope, this isn't the start of a science fiction book!’, chirped the BBC’s website.

The comment refers to an article on Neuralink-  a company co-founded by Elon Musk-  which is currently hiring someone to lead a team of researchers that will test the chips it plans to place in people's brains. In 2019, it claimed to be able to insert them by 2020, which never happened. Yet they are not for for giving up. Such technology will initially be greeted with deeply-held suspicion, much as vaccines have been. Yet as cybercrime grows and social security is threatened by such things as illegal migration, a way of controlling access to online accounts and data will be received with greater enthusiasm. As password demands become more numerous and complicated, so the idea of directly controlling our bank balances with a blink or a thought will increasing appeal to many.

Suffice to say, I’ll not be allowing Mr Musk to pop one inside my brain.

Image by Iván Jesus Rojas from Pixabay