A magician in Missouri had a kooky idea: implant a computer chip into his hand and then do some fun magic tricks with it. Too bad he forgot the password.
It sounds like a short story cooked up by Kurt Vonnegut, but it really happened to Zi Teng Wang, a magician and molecular biologist in Missouri — who posted about his predicament in his Facebook account this month, complete with an x-ray picture of his hand showing the white outline of the offending microchip embedded in the meat between his thumb and index finger.
“I’m living my own cyberpunk dystopia life right now, locked out of technology inside my body, and it’s my own damn fault,” wrote Wang, who goes by the stage name Zi the Mentalist.
On first glance, it’s a pretty funny anecdote, but as companies like billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink push brain chips to the public, Wang’s personal tale serves as a cautionary tale for the risks of having any technology, whether private and public, embedded into your body; companies may go out of business, product lines discontinued, or in the case of Wang, you stupidly forget the bloody password.
Wang explained in the Facebook post that he had a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip inserted into his hand “ages ago” for fun magic tricks, but it required someone — such as an audience member — to press their smart phone with a RFID reader to Wang’s hand to activate whatever trick he developed.
“[B]ut it turns out that pressing someone else’s phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is, really doesn’t come off super mysterious and magical and amazing,” he wrote. “And often people have that reader disabled, too, while using my own phone for the scan also lacks oomph for the obvious reasons.”
Moving away from using the gadget as a magic prop, he later tinkered around with the chip by rewriting it with a Bitcoin address and then had it link to an image meme on Imgur, the online image-sharing platform. READ MORE
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