People are becoming wedded to machines and technology at an ever-increasing rate, but few have gone quite as far as one man who has been left living in his 'own cyberpunk dystopia' after losing the password to a microchip implanted inside his body.
Although we're still a while away from technology like Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chips becoming a widespread reality, scientists have made progress in powering certain 'biocomputers' using real human brain cells.
The reality of cybernetics – at least for one man – is far more mundane, as a future where man blends with machine has been made redundant rather quickly due to a costly mistake.
As reported by Futurism, Zi Teng Wang, a Missouri-based magician, thought that implanting an RFID microchip into his hand would make for the perfect magic trick. Apparently, Wang thought he would be able to make certain web pages appear 'out of thin air' on the phones of his audience members.
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In theory, he would load an image or link onto the chip inside his hand, and then wave it around the phone in an attempt to activate the device's RFID reader, sending the device to the destination he had pre-programmed.
Unfortunately, this didn't exactly go to plan when it came to performing the trick. Not only do a surprising number of people not even have their phone's RFID reader active – rendering the trick useless – but it wasn't quite as impressive as he hoped in the moments when he did pull it off.
"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 explained in a Facebook post.
Things quickly went from bad to worse when he realized that he'd managed to forget the password to this very chip. It left him unable to access what he had implanted into his own hand.
"I was horrified to realize I forgot the password I had locked it with," Wang explained. "Techie friends I've consulted with have determined that it's too dumb and simple to hack, the only way to crack it is to strap on an RFID reader for days to weeks, brute forcing every possible combination."
One of the biggest initial problems with this conundrum is that the imgur link he was using before forgetting the password had become broken, meaning that not only could he not change whatever he'd programmed the RFID chip to show, but it would end up leading the phone to a dead page.
Thankfully, this did eventually start working again, but he's still not managed to access the device. Wang jokes that he's "still locked out of my own body's tech, and that's inconvenient and hilarious. And I can honestly say that I forgot the password to my own hand."