The problem McMullan’s chips cleverly solve is relatively small-scale—but it’s still a problem, and any potential new-use case represents a significant step forward for a chip evangelist like him. As with most technologies, the tipping point for implantable chips will come when they become so useful they’re hard to refuse. It could happen sooner than you think: In September 2017, Three Square Market launched an offshoot, Three Square Chip, that is developing the next generation of commercial microchip implants, with a slew of originative health features that could serve as the best argument yet that microchips’ benefits can outweigh our anxieties about them.

Though new to the American workplace in this implantable form, radio-frequency-identification (RFID) technology has been around for decades, and has long been considered secure enough for commonplace use. RFID ear tags are used to register almost all farm and ranch livestock with the U.S. National Animal Identification System (in Australia, the system is mandatory). If you’ve checked luggage on a Delta Airlines flight, you can thank RFID luggage tags for the fact that your bag arrived at the same destination you did. And you probably already have a personal RFID chip that goes everywhere with you—it’s in your credit card.

The future of wearables makes cool gadgets meaningful.

But of course, the fear surrounding RFID implants has little to do with RFID itself, and everything to do with implantation. American pets safely receive RFID implants without complication every day; even so, many of their owners would cite something akin to safety as a reason not to get one of their own. When a company called Verichip developed its own health-care-oriented microchip implants in the early aughts, its research indicated that 90 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with the technology. The company got FDA approval for its devices in 2004, but folded just three years later, in large part due to studies that suggested a potential link between RFID transponders and cancer in lab animals. (The risks of cancer caused by RFID have since been found to be virtually nonexistent for humans and negligible for animals, and one 2016 study even suggested that embedding active RFID transponders within cancerous tumors could be an effective means of treatment.)

A decade later, floating throughout the eruptive hullabaloo around Three Square’s “chip party” were all kinds of fears—some credible, some less so—about the dangers of introducing subdermal radio technology to the American workplace: that companies might make widespread use of this technology mandatory, or that implanted microchips might be hacked or used to track wearers, or that hands might be severed in the name of home break-ins. Many critics, including state legislators working to pass bills that would restrict RFID implants, are fearful that the metal components and circuitry in the chips would mean certain death if a “wearer” were exposed to an MRI machine or defibrillator.