February 15, 2002

9:31 AM

Get Chipped! A Brazilian legislator wants to become the first politician to be implanted with a controversial microchip that would contain his personal information. Hmmm, would the real Kevin Warwick please stand up.
posted by nakedjon (3 comments total)

Even though it's popular to scoff at Kevin Warwick as more Jim Rose sideshow than hard core researcher, I really dig the guy and they way he's leaping into cybernetic implants.

The big difference, though, is Kevin's chip was only a defacto identifier, the identifying taking place being just minimal enough to have the computers in the building recognize him and perform limited tasks, where as this de Cunha Lima person wants to start the sort of 666 mark of the beast crap so popular in alarmist religious bleatings.


Uncool, Antonio.
Uncool.
posted by dong_resin at 11:25 AM on February 15, 2002

"Kevin Warwick Watch", I like that. I once did an interview with him. Turned out there's a deep psychological reason why he's into bodily alteration with machinery: his dad (who taught autistic children) himself underwent some kind of crude brain surgery, to relieve his agoraphobia. And when Warwick' Snr came out of it, he was a completely different personality: from meek and mild, to angry, moody, unpredictable.

'"But looking back on it, just thinking of how the human brain operates, and how small changes in the wiring changes everything completely . . . I find that a lot of the arguments that defend the completeness of the human brain, as opposed to the limited nature of machine consciousness, they really do fall apart . . ."'

I've wondered since whether all these radical cyborg fanatix - Hans Moravec, the Extropians, Marvin Minsky - have a similar trauma in their background....Here's some other deep thinking about cyborgs.
posted by theplayethic at 12:26 PM on February 15, 2002

in the article, he says "I want to be the first person chipped. I want to be the first person chipped."
Seems whatever chip hes already got in there could use some programming.
posted by Eric Lloyd NYC at 3:17 PM on February 15, 2002