The relentless march of the microchips

Whilst implanted chips may appear to offer advantages of convenience for travellers, employees and consumers generally, they carry some important ethical baggage.

There are a number of important concerns. A growth in personal debt is one. As we remove the substantiality of cash, we encourage some people to spend without adequate forethought. Might not this be why we see the emergence of so many new charities devoted to helping people with debt?

There are obvious concerns with personal privacy and security too. Any computerised device can in theory be hacked – that is, remotely accessed and perhaps controlled without the owner's permission.

Already, our intense engagement with Cloud-based technologies today leaves many people concerned about their privacy. Identity theft is on the rise – to such a degree that police services admit that, though their members are better trained in this area than before, they cannot keep pace with its growth.

Meanwhile, every piece of data we upload to a favourite social media site carries the potential to bring the intrusive attention of marketers raining down upon us.

New marketing techniques such as geo-fencing rely on smartphones, which came to us as the first instalments of the internet of things. Our phones allow marketers to locate us and our online spending history shows them what kind of spam to fire our way.

We are moving but easily engaged targets for all manner of junk advertising, at any time of day.

Do we really want to make matters worse by turning our bodies into an extension of our phones?

We're already ceding much of our mental activity to machines. Everything from arithmetic to navigation and interpersonal communication is mediated today via technology.

It's because of this that many people in developed countries are pushing back against the incursion of work-based technologies into private life. German trade unions now insist that workers be able to escape their work-based email accounts at the end of each shift. Workers' groups in other countries are following suit.

Why then would workers want to tie themselves to a little piece of the workspace everywhere they go?

Yes, all technology is amoral and there's little doubting the great boon our machines have been to us.

Sometimes, though, we need to admit that not all progress is good progress; that pressing "pause" now and then gives us time to think through the future implications of emerging technologies.

Unless we do so, we may quickly discover that a surfeit of data does not equate to a surplus of wisdom.

If we're not willing to engage with reflective thinking, if we jump headfirst into every new type of technology in the belief that things that can be done should be done, we might just as well throw up our hands in resignation or despair. For the bots and the algorithms truly will surely, one day soon, reign supreme – and we will probably deserve our fate.