How can a device like this benefit society?

Question

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020311-214099,00.html

Answer 1

It's concievable that a sub-dermal chip could provide a variety of benefits. Here are a few:

MEDICAL INFORMATION. It could be really handy to have your entire medical history in a form that was always with you and easy to find and read. In the unfortunate circumstance that you have lost consciousness and need treatment, providers could discover your blood type, current medications, and allergies without having to perform any tests of any kind. This could save money, time, and lives!

IDENTIFICATION. There is currently no substantial identification system. This is why credit card fraud, bad checks, and many other things are even possible. How does anyone really know you are who you say you are? Drivers' licence? Those are EASY to defraud or fake. It doesn't take much imagination to think of the many things that could be avoided or made simpler if people just had some reasonably certain way of demonstrating they are who they say they are!

Of course, there will be nay-sayers who fear monitoring and control through some kind of tracking system. What the nay-sayers fail to realize is that we are on the threshold of being able to track everything and everyone whether they cooperate or not:

Police cars are already being equipped with devices that automatically and optically read licence plates and check against databases of information as well as storing sighting locations in case a check in the future seeks where a particular vehicle has been used. Programs have been developed that can do the same with a human face, identifying individuals by their appearance, and voice-print programs have been around for a long, long time.

I do not believe anyone can stop this. There are too many parties interested in knowing what you are doing, where, and when. Those who wish to opt out of such a system will be forced to avoid contact with society altogether lest they be passively scanned, catalogued, and tracked the first time they come in contact with any business, streetcorner, or concerned citizen. Even now this may be the only way of retaining whatever illusion of privacy you wish to have (and even so you can be tracked by satellites and the like, so the effort may be pointless).

Those who wish to opt into the system can at least enjoy what benefits it can provide, and perhaps shape it into something they can live with instead of letting other make the decisions of what form it will take without them.

Answer 2

It won't. It will lead to the threshold of an Orwellian world where the government can monitor almost every movement.