Imperceptible sensors can be printed directly on human skin
cam.ac.uk
cam.ac.uk
> The bioelectronic fibres, which are repairable, can be simply washed away when they have reached the end of their useful lifetime, and generate less than a single milligram of waste: by comparison, a typical single load of laundry produces between 600 and 1500 milligrams of fibre waste.
Hmm.. so yes? Most people bathe at least a few times a week. Also, the fibre waste from laundry is also known as microplastics, aka the thing we've all already been concerned about. This will just add a bit more?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316918
Ah, wait, that's me.
some dude wandering around with SUPREME on his forehead that light up each time he shines a blacklight on it. and also happens to track everywhere he goes
* Augmented touch perception via dual-ECG sensing with person-i wearing bioelectronic fibre arrays and person-ii without. * A breathable skin-gated OECT on a fingertip * Dual-modal sensing for augmented perception of mist pulses with acidic, alkaline and neutral compositions distinguished through colorimetric and electrical readouts.
That is amazing.
Unknown to the baby and enforced by martial law.
We constantly shed skin. The powers-that-be in whatever dystopian mark-of-the-beast fantasy you're imagining would have to regularly reapply these sensors, so they wouldn't remain unknown for long.
Any power apparatus capable of regularly and forcibly applying these sensors is certainly capable of just forcibly tattooing (or microchipping) you.
Tech can be misused and that's why democracy, privacy, etc. is crucial, but these people always make these weird/cheap/lazy, throwaway statements in a defeatist tone of predetermined supernatural evil. It's such learned helplessness.
Meanwhile many municipalities in modern countries have done practical things like banned facial recognition from use by law enforcement.
If it's a human source of evil we have human methods and forms of governance to address the potential issues, but these supernaturalist recommendations always seem to advocate that the solution is to vote in this one dude that is God's man.
40 years of this crap and they've been wrong or hyperbolic to the point of absurdity every damn time, all while eroding their own freedoms via the policies their chosen champions have passed any time a slightly real threat comes along.
I’m not saying humans aren’t usually terrible, just that this particular technology doesn’t unlock any new or more nefarious terribleness.
It is a perfect material to enable mental torture. Years ago when I was a kid I had a newspaper route. From about 3 am to 5:30-6:00 am each morning I rolled newspapers and then walked or ran the route through my assigned neighborhood throwing those rolled newspapers wherever the customers had requested them to be in the morning.
One of the worst possible things that you could encounter along the route were spider webs. Many of these homes had large trees, hedges, etc that grew along sidewalks and spiders are experts at bridging wide gaps with thin tendrils of sticky web. I'm sure their workday started as soon as they detected a break in the web and didn't end until they ran out of food or mated and died. They were busy.
I learned to travel the worst parts of the route with a newspaper held vertically at arm's length in front of my face so that I minimized the chance that I would walk face-first into a web and trap the spider on the wrong side of the web. That had happened too many times and it was always disconcerting to feel the web clinging to your face while something alive is struggling to escape from underneath it right beside your nostril.
That's why with the first mention of the properties and diameter of this material the very first thought I had was an unpleasant memory of a hungry spider, frantically trying to escape his predicament and how this material would be most effective as a torture device used to give people the sensation that something is on their skin when in fact there is nothing there.
It would also be a way to tickle someone without ever touching them or to induce a feeling that things are crawling on them.
I personally can see the utility in this sensor string for the use cases noted in the article but I can also the very real potential for abuse.
That said, the idea that people in power wouldn't think of ways to abuse pretty much any technology and that considering such things is some personal fault of @doublerabbit is quite the silly accusation for @iancmceachern to have made.
I wasn't comparing "people in power" to the parent commenter.
I was comparing the study authors to the parent commenter.
My point was, more globally, should we halt scientific progress because things could be used with bad intent to do bad? Where, and how, do we draw the line?
They snag on to small quotes and tiny threads and recycle them for decades. Fabrications like The Protocols from the late 1800s or the Rothchilds Waterloo story from the 1840s still get bandied about.
From Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy to the modern Alex Jones, it's actually just a few pages of misinterpreted empirical evidence, quotes without context or poorly written headlines
We should all be weary of adding something to that list.