future
Tim Radford
Kevin Warwick has just made history. The 44- year-old professor of cybernetics at Reading University, United Kingdom, got his own doctor to implant him with a silicon chip. He then opened a doorway into the future.
Actually, he opened a doorway into his own university department. As he stepped into the building, the building said: ”Welcome, Professor Warwick.”
Warwick has – for one week only – a little glass capsule containing a chip and a magnetic coil sewn under the dermis of his arm just above his left elbow. It is a smart card, so to speak, up his sleeve. The smart card is not a new idea. The smart building is not a new idea. And silicon implants have been part of medical science for years.
But earlier this month the three things met and began to do a new kind of business. The Reading cybernetics department doorway can distinguish between people with smart cards and people without. It opens doors for those it recognises, and tracks them through the building.
Warwick’s left elbow is a step beyond, into the world of The X-Files and Big Brother. As his elbow moves through a radio field, the coil within it becomes electrically charged and powers a unique signal from the 64-bit chip which is attached to it.
”The potential of such a technology is enormous,” he said. ”For instance it would be quite possible to implant an Access or Visa card into an individual on a silicon chip.”
Warwick and two colleagues – Grant Foster and Darren Wenn – have been working on the networks that link simple microprocessors throughout buildings and the implications for the future.
Warwick’s implant is a tiny cylinder 23mm long and 3mm wide. If you wanted to know where Warwick was, you had only to look on a department computer screen: it checked him from one office to another. Tomorrow’s intelligent building could clock him in and out, open doors for him, turn on lights, switch on heaters.
The building itself would start learning. It would recognise his place in the hierarchy, remember his preferences of lighting levels and office temperatures. It could switch on any computer he approached, log him on and have his e-mail ready to read.
Warwick says: ”This really smacks of Big Brother. We are showing you science fact, but it is pointing very heavily to science fiction of the past, the building being aware of who is in it, being able to track those people, give access or not.
”Cybernetics is all about humans and technology interacting. For a professor of cybernetics to become a true cyborg – part man, part machine – is therefore rather appropriate.”