1984

The AGE: Facing the future with a chip in the shoulder

Forget mobile phones as the hottest new media technology - for anyone under 30, handsets as we know them will be gone in 20 years. The world's tech-savvy youngsters will be using microchip implants to communicate and transact.

April, Barcelona's Baja Beach Club began microchipping its VIP nightclub members, to let them into exclusive areas and clock up drinks and food via a chip implant in the arm produced by VeriChip Corporation. Within a decade, Mr Grulke says, microchips will be common. Already two scientists at Britain's Warwick University have chips embedded under their skin that let them send emails just by thinking

"PP: By pure coincidence (ahem) IBM, the company behind Verichip, the major retailer of implantable chips, also ran the cataloging system used by the Nazis to store information on Jews in Hitler Germany. Something tells me we should be a tad more concerned about that than who's going to win American Idol"