My puppy went in for surgery last week to get spayed. When I dropped her off, they asked me if I wanted to get her microchipped as well. I told them she’d been microchipped already when she was a baby. If she ever gets lost, all animal services has to do is pass a scanner over her, and immediately they’ll know where she lives, and how to contact me. It got me thinking a little bit… how come we don’t microchip humans?

I mean, obviously we have the technology. Aside from the obvious uses, such as identifying lost children and corpses (hopefully not one and the same), they could be used for simple identification. We could do away with licenses alltogether. Want to buy alcohol? Just swipe your wrist under a scanner.

Obviously the majority of the people who would object (unless there’s something I’m not thinking of) would be the people who have something to hide. Criminals, illegal immigrants, or kids who want to use fake ID’s. Which begs the question: do we really care about what these people want anyway? I certainly don’t. In fact, I’m all for making it harder for criminals to hide.

Now, I’m not saying we should go as far as being tracked via satellite from space or anything. No cameras in our home or having our emails read. I’m talking strictly about identification, which we all have to carry anyway. But we have to carry lots of it. Our license, our medical insurance cards, our social security card, emergency contact, etc. How many times have you gone out and forgotten your license? It’s happened to me a few times.

What if you were in a car accident alone, knocked unconscious and none of your identification carries some important information, like your blood type or medical allergies? What if the EMT could scan your microchip and have that information immediately, along with family members to call and notify?

You could be chipped at a young age, and when you pass your driver’s test, they just update the information in the database to reflect that you are legal to drive. And again, when you turn eighteen, or twenty one, the chip will reflect that.

What about if you had to swipe your chip when buying age restricted materials, and your random chip number was attached to the purchase somehow. So when a mother goes and buys her son a bloody, violent M-rated game, and then turns around and starts bitching that the game is violent, we can go to the record and say “Hey moron, YOU bought it for him. Wake up, you stupid shit.”

Like I said, unless you’re trying to hide something (and there are no legitimate, legal reasons to carry a fake ID), identification is something we all already deal with. So why not make it easier and more efficient?

It’s just something I was thinking about.

If you want to weigh in and discuss (maturely and intelligently, please), instead of emailing me, head over to this forum thread I made. As much as I love getting the email, I end up responding with the same thing over and over and over again, and also nobody but me reads your views. This way you can hear other people’s points of view.

Unless everyone agrees with me, which would make for a pretty boring discussion. But that never happens anyway.