The Rise of Microchipping

On August 1, 2017, workers at Three Square Market, a company specializing in vending machines, lined up in the office cafeteria to be implanted with microchips. One after another, they held out a hand to a tattooist who pushed a rice-grain sized implant into the flesh between their thumb and forefinger. The group implant event, organized by company management, fitted into Three Square Market’s longer-term vision of a cashless payment system for their vending machines — workplace snacks purchased with a flick of the wrist. The televised “chipping party” was picked up by media outlets from Moscow to Sydney. 【小题1】 After the event, Three Square Market’s Google reviews page was flooded with one-star ratings.

For Jowan Österlund, whose company Biohax provided the service, microchip implants were not radical or even novel. He has lived with one for years and has implanted hundreds of other young, tech-savvy (技术大咖) Swedes. 【小题2】 They have used their implants to gain access to their co-working spaces, pay for gym membership, and even to ride the train. But are the people of the world ready for technology to start getting under their skin?

Microchip implants are essentially cylindrical (长圆形的) bar codes that, when scanned, transmit a unique signal through a layer of skin. 【小题3】 Today, Biohax is aiming to simplify identity and access in the digital world, offering a replacement to the seemingly endless collection of passwords, keys, tickets and cards that clutter our lives. Jowan’s friend Hannes Sjöblad has his own microchip-focused business. He believes that by placing a device under the skin, instead of wearing it like a Fitbit, data collection will be greatly improved.

But Urs Gasser at Harvard University believes that extending beyond the Swedish tech-hub environment to a broader market will be legally and morally difficult. In his view, Three Square Market’s chipping event actually symbolizes the imbalances of power in the workplace. Are you a person being paid for your work, or are you the property of the company you work for?

Ifeoma Ajunwa at Cornell University adds that it is crucial to consider the implications of this technology in the context of increasing worker surveillance (管制). 【小题4】 This seems to blur the line between work and family life,” she said.

On Tuesday, the Amazon Company introduced Amazon One, which connects your palm(手掌) print to a stored credit card so you can place your hand above a sensor to enter and leave easily after buying at checkout-free Amazon(AMZN) Go stores.

Dilip Kumar, Amazon’s vice president told CNN Business that Amazon One had been used since long before the COVID-19. But the timing could be a positive for Amazon: Customers may find such payment convenient, and businesses also find it hopeful.

Yet the use of the Amazon One could raise eyebrows, too. Amazon has once come under fire from people who care about its facial-recognition software. When it comes to Amazon One data, Kumar said all palm pictures are coded and Amazon stores them online.

“I encourage people to try it, see how they like the experience,” Kumar said. You can hold your palm above an Amazon One scanner to enter the store. Then, anything you take will be automatically (自动地) charged to the credit card connected to their palm. Amazon One will make shopping faster and more convenient. Before trying it, users must place a credit card in an Amazon One device and hold a palm above it, facing down, so it can be scanned. The camera in it takes many pictures of the fine lines of the palm, and catches some details, which can’t be seen in typical photographs.

Amazon One now can be bought at two of the Amazon Go stores in Seattle, at 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street, and in the South Lake Union neighborhood.

A “Quick Response Code”, also known as QR code is a type of barcode that Denso Wave developed, a Japanese barcode developer, in 1994.

The use of technology saves people's efforts in labor. In the early 1960s, the economy of Japan entered high economic growth. During this period, supermarkets and convenience stores thrived and were selling a wide variety of goods ranging from food to clothing. To keep up with the demand for checkout counters, cash registers（收银机）were widely used. Due to the heavy workload, cashiers on the checkout counters experienced numbness on their wrists and developed a kind of disease. As a solution to the problem, the Point of Sales (POS) system was developed and included the use of barcodes.

In the long run, developers noticed the problem barcodes held. The limit of 20 alphanumeric characters was not long enough in holding a product's information and the position of how a barcode is scanned leads to scan failures. Denso Wave stepped in and invented a new type of barcode that could hold more information and could be scanned in any scanner direction. Thus, QR code was introduced in 1994 and has made history up to today.

Today, QR codes are generally used in advertising, business, health care, and education. There are two types of QR codes: Static QR codes and Dynamic QR codes. Static QR codes are QR codes that are free and permanent. This type of QR code is not modifiable （可修改的） and therefore cannot change the data stored in the QR code. Dynamic QR codes are QR codes that are modifiable in content and can store more data even after you have printed it into the paper.