What Does It Mean To Get Chipped?
"I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section"
Denis Leary's rant in Demolition Man is a final grasp at preserving humanity in an otherwise sterilized world of servitude and submission. In his universe, machine helped man sand down the sharp edges of his own spunk and chaos, leaving only a bubble-wrapped, inoffensive sandbox behind.
It was the pervasive use of science fiction technology that did his world in. But we've given Hollywood a run for its money, commodifying technology today that seemed impossible only yesterday. Our thrust forward has revolutionized our tools and environment, but what impact will it have on us? Could it strip us of our colorful human spirit that evolved over an eternity, turning us into drones? It's impossible to make a value judgement as to whether that's good or bad — some will welcome it, others will bristle. So instead, let me just persuade you that something that big is coming.
During a book club discussion on Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the concept of "getting chipped" inevitably came up. This phrase has made its way into the zeitgeist, and even though there's no precise definition, it evokes common imagery of a human getting a microchip implant and turning into a partial cyborg.
Initially it helps you identify yourself at kiosks and pay for goods, but maybe in the future those kiosks turn into "security" checkpoints, and maybe the chip "enhances" your mental state, or controls it altogether — perhaps bypassing the primal circuits that impede corporate utility. Or something like that… Like I said, the specifics are vague, but we'll talk about it soon.
For now, let's talk about how people react to new things. When a new technology or social evolution emerges, so do two camps of people. First, there're the doomsdayers who shout "this change is bad and we have to stop it!", and second is the business-as-usual folks, who warmly say "we've always been changing; this change is like all the others, and should be embraced." Truthfully there's a whole spectrum in between, but those two poles carve the boundaries of discourse.
Change is the only constant
To open-minded people, "getting chipped" is another incremental change on the spectrum of ones we've coped with for centuries — it's nothing out of the ordinary. These people are usually right. They paint with convincing brushstrokes, visions of how our current tools and world would be unrecognizable to, and even resisted by, our forefathers, and how we've benefited by adapting anyways.
I mean, imagine telling a Massachusetts Bay Colony farmer from the 1600s that he'd soon sit in a cold metal tube, rocket across the city to a fluorescent-lit produce aisle, and bag lettuce that grew a thousand miles away from his "homestead" — now a tiny studio apartment in a swanky strip of manmade land called "Back Bay." Something something iPhones ... Zoom calls ... ChatGPT…
It's true that countless innovations over the centuries have erected a world unimaginable to even recent ancestors. It's even more true that each change along the way contended with its era's doomsayers and holdouts, who resisted the change out of fear that it'd finally decay society.
Remember when Socrates warned against writing, because it would weaken the memories of those trying to learn? Centuries later, when the value of writing was incontestable, the argument shifted to critique those who weren't good enough at it! The fear was that the younger generation, supposedly uniquely lazy, would finally ruin the high standards that elders had maintained for centuries. Consider Harvard President Charles Eliot, who in 1871 bawled:
Bad spelling, incorrectness, as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation… are far from rare among young men otherwise well prepared for college studies.
This was after Henry David Thoreau warned that the railroad was overtaking idyllic American life, and well before the early 2000s, when CNN wrote the scare tactic headline “E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’.” Heck, as email got popular even CNN fell prey to the usual scare tactics, publishing the headline "E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot'". Similarly apocalyptic arguments are made about today's youths. In short, we live in our own time; we're biased towards thinking the past was golden, our present changes are unique, and they alone leave us teetering on the brink of atrophy. But more often than not, this mindset is wrong!
Practically every metric shows that human beings are in a period of expansion, not contraction, only getting healthier, wealthier, more peaceful, and more innovative with time. The truth is we're constantly evolving, constantly adapting. Things aren't always getting worse, they're just always changing — mostly for the better.
Inductive hypothesis
If you find yourself nodding along so far, you probably think the same must be true for "getting chipped" — it's just another one of the million innovations we've coexisted with for centuries, right? This is the first sign that you're not thinking big enough — and I say this with full knowledge of our natural bias towards believing that "this change is different, this time I'm serious!!" I argue that "getting chipped" presents a departure from the usual steady wave of incremental changes we've seen so far.
How big of a departure, you ask? Three hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, we continue to honor it as a landmark event in our history textbooks, despite it being entirely absent from our lives today, having been obsoleted by internal combustion engines & electricity. But in our future textbooks, the engineering leap from rickshaws to Rivians & palanquins to Porsches will look more like the upgrade from lightning to USB-C — a footnote in the changelog of life — when compared with "getting chipped."
That's because "getting chipped" offers not just another incremental bump in technology like we're used to, but rather a new category of existence altogether. As such, it can't be compared to the old changes we've experienced thus far. It's true that a Rivian electric vehicle would be unimaginable to the affluent Tokyo rickshaw rider in 1869, being wheeled around by sweaty peasants, but let's look at what's actually changed to get humans to today's once-unimaginable state.
In that timeframe, we've developed new ways of harvesting food, new ways of storing that food, new ways of communicating with people, new ways of seeing people, new ways of creating people, new ways of saving people, new ways of protecting people, and new ways of killing people. Each of these innovations represent something unrecognizable to a previous generation, but all have one thing in common: they're external to people. They trace the evolution of things around us, but the human in the rickshaw is largely the same human in the Rivian. Our "things" have gone through countless new-species-like evolutions, but we have not. We're the same old bag of bones and stew of evolutionary instincts we've always been, just in a rapidly-evolving environment that we tirelessly tinker with.
Naysayers would balk, pointing out all the interesting changes to our human scaffolding over time. Once unsophisticated, malnourished, and primitive, we've since had colossal increases in brain size, IQ scores, and even physical attributes like height, proving we're not so static after all. They'd argue that enhancements in nutrition, public health, and medicine give today's humans different capabilities than yesterday's — but they'd completely miss the point.
We're still on the old instruction set. We haven't had a human system update since long before we've done anything recorded as impressive in our history books. Human biology — the fundamental structure of our brain and bodies — remains generally unmoved. We still battle the same primitive urges, limitations, and quirky wiring that all hardened long before our best work began. These building blocks are fixed into place, and even though they become modestly "bigger" and more extreme versions of themselves when our environment permits, our changes haven't been transformational. Rather, they're akin to the changes a bodybuilder undergoes.
Bodybuilders optimize their lifestyle, tools, and consumption to provide for the extreme growth of muscles — the same muscles that every other human has. They don't create new, novel muscles that only they have; nor do they radically redesign the structure of the human chest and back, on top of which "new", never-before-seen muscles grow. Instead, they just work within the same biological bounds that everyone else has, optimizing for things most people don't. They become extreme versions of the thing everyone else is.
For thousands of years, the only thing that's evolved that rigidly and constrained is us. This is unlike everything we've invented, where we've spawned spanking new industries & fields of science out of whole cloth to make things that simply didn't exist before we created them. If we were in the habit of assigning species names to our inventions, then certainly a "palanquin" is a different species than a "Porsche." To get from one to the other, you'd have to piece-by-piece replace every last part of the palanquin with a new part whose existence depends on a novel field of science. The same goes for everything we interact with daily — except ourselves, Homo sapiens.
But in the fullness of time — and much less of it than you think — "getting chipped" will change this.
Changing us
"Getting chipped" marks the beginning of an era where we finally start to tinker with ourselves, not just our surroundings. It presents an opportunity to see new-species-like changes in humans for the first time. I believe that eventually chips will let us exchange primitive functions in our reptilian brains for "optimal" ones that persistently self-tune in response to modernity. This is how the human brain tries to behave on its own, but it's bounded by biology — the calloused physical wiring & instincts that have resisted modernization.
So what's this modernization look like in practice? In a Lyft home from the book club, I brainstormed with a friend about how this could play out. Dan is a gunner at Google that loves to cook, and I asked why he would ever cook again if he were to get chipped to enhance his focus & productivity? His answer was straightforward and innocent: "Cooking helps me disconnect from work, to take a break; if a chip made me more productive, I'd still want to come back to cooking to take breaks."
For early versions of this tech, his answer is sound. But far in the future, it feels optimistic at best. Momentarily pausing your climb up the accomplishment ladder by "taking breaks," "feeling done," "getting tired," and appreciating the arts are inclinations we've always had — so we assume they'll always be there. Every day, Dan's worker brain contends with Dan's hobbyist brain, and the two negotiate how to share time and energy, tapping each other in and out.
But imagine that Dan's natural, unaided hobbyist brain now has to contend with a supercharged worker brain — one that's optimized to grind & focus twice as hard, and doesn't need to cede control to hobbyist urges to rescue it from burnout or give it downtime. That brain stands no chance against its beefed-up compatriot, suddenly playing by new rules, and maybe a whole slew of ordinary human behavior gets drowned out. This is a very narrow, exaggerated example, but it's trying to make a point.
If chips can rewire the nervous system to give quadriplegics the use of their limbs, sight to the blind, speech to the mute, and eventually perform "consensual telepathy", what's next? Alongside these blessings, what parts of the classic human experience would society choose to mute or suppress? It's totally conceivable that we'd bypass things like:
the need for sleep;
the heart pounding you get before asking someone out;
impulsive pleasure-seeking, and the accomplishment you feel when defeating it;
the constant jockeying for social status that's baked in our monkey brain;
edges of our personality that comprise subtle pleas to be viewed favorably;
the little hacks we have to endure to memorize information
What's more is that you can't say whether these effects are good or bad, because you can only judge them from within your skin, where these familiar forces are all essential. For example, a life without REM sleep sounds awful because you know how bad you feel without it, but consider how it'd feel to a cyborg that actually doesn't need it. Or this common rebuttal:
If a chip let me feel a sense of accomplishment without actually achieving anything, then it wouldn't feel like real accomplishment
This is true in your current brain, which excels at comparing your current self with memories of yourself struggling through something worthwhile. This comparison tickles the right circuits in your brain that produce a genuine sense of success — but what if you could tickle those same circuits with a chip that skips the middle man? At last, hard work is no longer a prerequisite to feeling a sense of achievement.
All of this is to say that on the surface, these things feel scary, because in order to judge the ramifications, you have to put yourself in the shoes of something you can't imagine — another human species whose evolution is tied to the symbiotic relationship with technology that's coming, whether you like it or not.
Moral ramifications moving forward
Maybe you think humans need to be written, and you embrace this future. You believe our wiring needs to be modernized to catch up to our lifestyles. Or maybe you're like me, and all of this sounds scary as hell — your inclination is to recoil, save money, and challenge the world to just try and come for your humanity and see what happens.
Both of these takes are completely valid, because they're subjective. But a much more gooey and interesting conversation about ethics falls out from this:
What happens when this tech radically increases the wealth gap?
Should everyone have equal access to this tech?
Should we provide aid to people that reject microchips, and fall behind in the economy?
Is it ethical to rewire the brain in all the ways I expect will be possible?
How far can we go? Should some changes be banned?
What regulation should be imposed on funding this tech?
The ethical conversation is so interesting, and I'll intentionally sidestep it for now. I can't help you answer these questions, even though I have opinions. All I can do is table my personal responses and try to clarify the shape of what's coming, hopefully convincing you along the way that it's as significant as I suggest. It is against that backdrop that the conversation of ethics must be had.