5 Tiny Technologies That Will Doom Us (From The Inside Out)

5 An Emotion Broadcasting/Receiving Chip

Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading has a new and exciting idea: to implant a mood-detecting microchip in his brain, and then sync that chip with an identical one embedded in his wife. You will notice that at no point did we say this was a good idea, just a new and exciting one.

He hasn't done it yet, but we totally believe he can. Why?

Well, Warwick's got a history of these kinds of bionic shenanigans (dibs on a new DJ name!). He's already implanted a chip in his arm that activates the lights and doors in his office, and another that remotely signals a bionic hand mounted to some plywood in his apartment, presumably just to fuck with the cat when he's not around.

That stuff is all awesomely crazy, but it's the kind of harmless cyborg chicanery a lot of scientists are engaging in recently. The Emotion Chip is a whole other, more dangerous genre of insanity.

It started when his team rigged up the sensor in his arm to transmit to a necklace. It senses when he's excited and makes the necklace glow red, it goes back to blue when he calms down. His wife wears it.

Why this is useful information for the wife to have isn't clear, since you really do need more details before you know how to react (i.e. is the "excitement" you detect due to him having just won the Nobel Prize? Or because he's banging a grad assistant? Or getting beaten by the police?)

But no matter; Warwick plunged ahead and took the next "logical" step: having his wife implanted with a matching sensor that would let her sense his feelings without the necklace. And by all accounts, it works just like he says it does.

So when he says he wants to implant a sensor in his brain--and his wife's brain--that will essentially give them emotional telepathy, we can't help but watch with interest. It's for the same reason we would watch a bear try to ride a motorcycle--it'll be interesting whether he succeeds or not.

And if he does, well, the implications are insane.

The Downside:

Let's imagine a world where this product has been patented and sold for consumer use. If a husband and wife get these, and one of them gets pissed off, does it transmit the anger directly to the other's brain? Let's say one day Warwick is a bit grumpy--maybe his bionic hand is on the fritz and keeps flicking him in the ear while he's trying to work, or maybe he walked by a magnet and now he has to get minor surgery just to unlock his front door--whatever the cause, that general mood is now transmitting to his wife. And now she's pissed off at him for pissing her off.

Wouldn't this just create an endless feedback loop of anger, until somebody winds up getting stabbed? These things will totally lead to a worldwide ragepocalypse.

4 The Internal ID Chip

We live in an increasingly automated society, and it's not hard to see why: People are dicks. Look no further than the way we shop these days--we buy online when we can, but when we have to shop in brick-and-mortar stores we've got debit cards and self-checkout lanes that let us enter, buy, pay and leave without making eye contact with a single other human.

But sometimes those self-service lanes are full, or broken, or maybe the goddamn thing just will not scan the UPC code on your bag of potatoes correctly and, rather than giving you the perfectly reasonable "fuck these potatoes" option, they automatically flag down an employee for you, thus forcing you to chat with someone who was considered too socially unappealing for a job as a checkout boy.

Well, thanks to the folks at VeriPay, there may be a solution: They want to install a chip in your arm with all of your bank information that will be automatically read when you leave any store with items on your person. Just shop, fill your cart, and leave. No lines, no scanning, no swiping. A signal detects the tags on the merchandise, then connects with the chip in your arm, then electronically sucks the money from your account.

So convenient. And all they're asking for in exchange is complete access to all of your banking details and the permission to embed themselves deep, deep inside of your body. We've all made that arrangement with some dude before, right?

The uses of ID chips inside your body aren't limited to shopping, however. There's also Verichip, another microchip embedded in your arm that links you and your gun together, so that your weapon won't fire unless it detects a connection with its verified host chip. Not only would this practically eliminate the chances of children finding guns and harming themselves, but it would also drastically increase the traceability of firearms. With Verichip, if your gun is used in a murder, you can't say it was lost, or stolen, or a case of mistaken identity: It only fires in your hand.

Granted, criminals wouldn't tend to be the type to get the chip implanted anyway, but the thought is there.

The Downside:

And now that we think of it, how long until bad guys hack that system? No system is completely secure; the entertainment industry has spent enough capital to start a solid gold moon country in their attempts to curb media piracy, and the eight different remasters of Total Recall sitting in our Downloads folder right now say that's not exactly working out for them.

You think identity theft is bad now? Piss off a hacker in the implanted microchip future and the next day the cops smash through your door. Their records will show that not only did your gun just whack an entire orphanage execution style, but that you also blew your life's savings on hemorrhoid cream and animal-themed dildos that same day.

3 The Micro-Surgeon

After we're all good and comfortable with computers inside us managing our financial transactions, surely we'll be fine with one of them floating around our aorta with a tiny razor-sharp blade.

They call it the Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System. It's "assembling" because you swallow it in 15 separate bite-sized pieces, and then it reassembles itself inside your body. At this point it can perform minor surgeries and routine maintenance without the need for external incisions.

Why, we can't imagine a single way that could go wrong, even if it happened in the first chapter of a horror novel called RROD: Rogue Robotic Organ Destroyer.

The Downside:

We work for the Internet, so we're not exactly luddites over here. Still, the largest, most successful, most well-funded software company in the world thought Windows Vista--the OS equivalent of purchasing a pre-on-fire Ford Pinto--was a good enough idea to sink millions of dollars and several years into.

Obviously the FDA won't approve the tech in general if it doesn't work, but again we raise the specter of hackers; any robot operating inside of your body would have to operate wirelessly (you're not going to have a CAT5 cable running out of your nostril to the doctor's control panel) and where there's a signal, there's a potential for somebody to hack it (see the story about Iraqis hacking into unmanned military drones... with a $26 piece of software). Are we being paranoid when we picture a 4chan prank causing our tiny surgeon-bot to go drilling into our balls?

And are we being paranoid when we point out the name of this surgery 'bot is the "Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal-Surgical System"?

ARES? As in... as in "the god of war" Ares?

Jesus Christ! Best of luck to you if you still wanna deepthroat the Killbot 5000. We'll sit this one out.

2 The Psychic Internet

Bioengineers in Utah have come up with something they call the "Utah Electrode Array," and it is nothing less than a very rough, very rudimentary version of a cyberspace brainjack.

Like in Neuromancer. Like in the Matrix. Like in the nerdly wet dreams of everybody reading this article right now.

For the moment, the chip only downloads information from the brain onto a hard drive. But the very fact that it's capable of that feat means that the potential to do the opposite--upload data into your brain--is very real. And that's not just us making shit up we want to hear: According to Bradley Greger, the supervisor of the Neural Engineering Lab at the University of Utah, the end goal of this entire project is to eventually link up the brain-chip to the Internet.

And as awesome as that's going to be, that's pretty much the end of human interaction as we know it.

The Downside:

There's maybe four hours in the modern man's waking life that is not spent on some form of media--Internet, email, music, television, the PC at work--it's been steadily encroaching further into our daily routine for years now. Once that access is inside your brain, you can multitask while doing literally anything: checking email while having sex, watching YouTube clips during meetings, playing a quick round of Tetris through your grandpa's boring anecdotes. And who's to say it even stops when you go to bed?

If it's truly a part of your brain, you'll likely be sleep-Googling in your dreams as well.

Right now only quadriplegics are getting the implant, and they're mostly just using it to slowly "thought-type," but when the floodgates inevitably open on biotechnology, this will probably be the first thing everybody gets. And forever afterward, every single personal interaction you have will be tainted by the knowledge that your conversational partner is probably watching cat-fisting fetish porn while simultaneously Photoshopping your head onto a hot, slutty little tabby for later posting in their Human Pussies Usergroup.

Of course, that's all assuming we can even still open our mouths to talk at that point, and haven't just quickly devolved into immobile walrus-like orbs of flesh after the mind-web is released.

1 Real Life HUD

In Seattle, Washington there are--right this very second--living bunny rabbits with cybernetic super-eyes.

Much like the Terminator, these bunnies see the world through real life Heads Up Displays. It's all thanks to their special bionic contact lenses which have near-microscopic CPUs embedded in them to send and receive visual information.

Now, admittedly their current HUD is pretty basic: An 8 x 8 pixel LED field. But that's really only because the money isn't there to build a better prototype. The technology for a more complicated, human-usable display is completely viable, right now and at this very second. It's not "far-removed into the future," or "waiting for a breakthrough" in new technology; you could have it tomorrow if somebody invested enough.

The creator and Grand Master of the Terminator Bunnies, Babak Parviz, says it is totally feasible to build an augmented reality interface to slip right atop your eyeball. Since the lens reads visual data (the direction and focus of your eye) as well as displays it, he doesn't think a command interface will be a problem. And since the amount of power needed is so small that it could be entirely provided by a microscopic solar array embedded right there in the lens, power supply is not an obstacle either.

The Downside:

Combine the aforementioned implantable Google with the eyeball overlay display, and you've got a woman who can quickly scan your ex-girlfriend's Twitter feed while you're trying to hit on her at the bar (first thing she reads: "OMG steve totally got drunk and pooped in my mailbox again").

But if these things hit the market in a few years, we're not going to deter you from getting them. Quite the opposite, in fact: We need to adopt it as soon as fucking possible, because as of this very moment, Pacific Northwest bunny rabbits are the most scientifically advanced species on Earth.

Yes, let's keep modifying the little furry bastards. Augment their brains. Give them the Internet so they can Google "the weakest spot on a human body accessible by bunny teeth" without pausing to break pursuit of their prey. While we run from the murderous bastards, having delirious Monty Python flashbacks, the bunnies can pull up our Facebook page, browsing that wacky test we took where we listed off all our irrational phobias. Oh, was leporiphobia not on that list? Maybe it's time to update that.

No, our society is not doomed by adopting this tech, it's doomed by every second we don't.

Do you have something funny to say about a random topic? You could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow. Go here and find out how to create a Topic Page.

To see the technology that's going to have to get out of the way for this stuff, check out Tech Zombies: 6 Technologies That Don't Know They're Dead. Or check out how you can construct your fancy name-brand products, in 7 High Tech Products And Their Cheap Ass Ingredients.

And stop by our Top Picks (Updated 12.29.2009) to pick up our brand new handbook, Terminating the Terminator Bunny.

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get dick jokes sent straight to your news feed.