By Josey Wales
Many people in society today dismiss the possibility that newborns will be required to have an RFID transponder implanted
in their bodies. Yet there is little doubt that governments are working
hard to track people, installing cameras on every corner, tracking cell
phones, tracking credit card purchases, tracking you online in social
media sites, just to name a few ways your government currently tracks
people. Since implantable chips have a read range of only a couple inches, right now it seems we are safe for the moment. But……..
So
people have been predicting the mass adoption of RFID since 2003.
They’ve also been underestimating just how important and ubiquitous RFID
will become. So let me explain why RFID adoption will begin to
accelerate, and then I will try to explain why I think we are all
underestimating its importance and it’s conveniences.
First,
technologies are always hyped. There are great expectations that a new
technology will change the world, and then it turns out to be more
difficult to deploy than people initially thought. It takes time for
technologies to mature, for complete solutions to be developed, even for
people to understand how the technologies should be used. Remember when
the Internet bubble burst and all the dot-coms went out of business?
RFID is
no different. After the initial hype, there was a global dismissiveness
about the technology. It doesn’t work around water and metal. Read rates
are too low. It’s too expensive. And so on and so forth. Now, almost 10
years later, the technology has reached a level of maturity—it now
works well in most situations, and there are tags that will work on
almost any object. There are software applications for many
applications, as well as readers in a wide variety of form factors. We
are beginning to see complete solutions emerge, and the technology is
getting somewhat easier to deploy (technology providers still have some
work to do in both these areas). All that is really left now is for one
industry to get enough adopters to embrace RFID to reach critical mass. At that point, adoption will take off.
How
long that will take is hard to say. NBC’s guess is it will be three more
years or so before the retail apparel sector adopts RFID on
a large scale, and from there other industries will then begin to
embrace the technology as well. In a decade, how big will the industry
be, and how ubiquitous will RFID be?
History suggests that it will be bigger than our wildest imagination.
Then implantable chips in people as a way to buy, sell, trade, collect a
pay check will become the norm in society. The transition will be
subtle and supported by the very recipients who find the RFID Chip
convenient in their every day lives.
When RFID was in the hype phase in 2005 and 2006, a gentleman from Europe wrote in claiming RFID would
flame out just as the Internet did. It was pointed out that while
Internet companies flamed out, use of the Internet was greater than
ever. Today, the Internet is more important, more ubiquitous and more
essential to business than anyone imagined in the heyday of the Internet
bubble. So why do people doubt that RFID will?
People underestimated the importance of personal computers. In the early 1980s, IBM estimated
the total global demand for personal computers would likely peak at
around 60,000 units annually. Demand actually peaked at about 346.2
million units in 2010. IBM underestimated the size of the market by a
factor of 5,770.
In 1980, AT&T commissioned famed consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to forecast cell phone penetration in
the United States by the year 2000. McKinsey boldly predicted there
would be roughly 900,000 subscribers. As it turns out, this was less
than 1 percent of the actual number of 109 million subscribers (in fact,
there are currently more than 327 million in the United States alone).
I could provide more examples, but you get the point.
There
is always some floundering as companies attempt to figure out how to
use new technologies. Remember all the millions invested in online
market places in the early days of the World Wide Web? Only a handful of
those survived. Similarly, there have been missteps in the application
of RFID. But people have now figured it out, and we are seeing some large deployments. Marks & Spencer, for example, will consume some 400 million passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags this year (see Marks & Spencer Leads the Way). And a Bechtel project in Australia is employing 60,000 active tags.
As RFID becomes
widely adopted, people will find new ways to use it. They will welcome
the convenience of a chip for all their daily needs. The transition has
been slow to date, but have no doubt that RFID Chips planted in babies
at birth will one day be the norm. Think about it, no birth
certificate, no SSI card necessary, no passport necessary, no more
credit cards to loose, personal security of knowing your RFID cannot be
hacked or duplicated, stop identity theft, the list of reasons people
will wllingly accept a chip goes on and on. Not to mention medical
records to be recorded on implantable chips. Link to Google Wants Implantable RFID Mircochips Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qFeLW4L-go
Main Stream Media is shaping
societies around the world to accept the RFID Chip as a means of keeping
up with the convenience of technology.
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