Okay, payment implants were, due to their relatively short lifespan, never an option for me - but a glassy that could monitor some stuff and maybe even work as a payment implant sounds nice.
I am sceptical because of several things, though… one of them is definitely the not-so-good-working walletmor thing itself, but there are other things about the planned walletmed that make me worry (aside from the stuff Pilgrim already said).
If you want to do payment, placement in the hand or wrist is the best or rather only viable option. I guess it will work for glucose monitoring as well, but the video says the chip can measure temperature, too - this won’t work at all in your hand. Not. At. All. I mean, it will take some sort of temperature, but this makes absolutely no sense. So why is there this ability at all? To me, it sounds a bit like “okay, people might be interested in monitoring stuff (which is true, see smartwatches, fitness trackers and all that), so let’s just put some of those inside the implant”. No matter if it makes sense or not.
So, glucose monitoring? Fine. Temperature? Cool idea. Maybe even stuff like blood pressure, whatever might be possible in the long run. But this implant would have to be placed in a way that would make interacting with a payment terminal totally ridiculous.
I doubt that this will happen.
- Thousands of people? Okay, if the implant is really working, doing a good job, and actually meets people’s needs, this might happen. Especially because it’s a glassy, so the threshold to just “try it out” is a lot lower. Still depends on the price, distribution, and the trust people have towards the brand itself.
- To reach “homogenous social acceptance” might take a lot of time. Pacemakers are socially accepted because people might very well just die without them, same with gene treatment for cancer and the like. But like you say yourself, gene treatment to modify “unneccessary” stuff like hair colour or sex (you can’t choose your child’s gender, your child might happen to do that by themselves
) is generally frowned upon. I have a temperature chip myself, and while lots of people find that funny or cool, the most frequent reaction is “well - why don’t you just use a thermometer?”.
It might actually help your case that those minimal invasive glucose monitors are quite a thing by now. - There will always be side effects. It’s a glassy, so in this forum we all know it will most likely do no harm at all. But there will be people who do stupid stuff during healing and risk rejection or infection. There might even be people who do stupid stuff afterwards and somehow manage to break the implant. There will be the usual technical issues, some implants themselves might fail. If you reached point 2 by that time, as in, the implant is spread around and at least a bit known outside this community, media will jump on everything that went wrong and might (or might not - I already see those yellow press headlines “Massive headaches and sleeplessness after I got implanted”
) have been caused by the implant.
Another tiny thing in the video (and I know it’s just a promo video which is not to be taken too seriously) - I guess you will have to use a proprietary app to scan your implant? So, same problem that’s already going on with the BeUno. By making it bound to your app, you push away parts of the pretty privacy-aware community you find here and among other tech-savyy and implant-friendly forums. And I am not sure how many customers (especially lets-just-try-this-out-guinea-pig-customers) you have beyond those communities.
) there and focus on what matters:
), people unbegrudgingly pay for services they either need or like.