A Scary Future Ahead
By Danielle Golfieri
Corsair Staff Writer

Human bar-coding and implanted tracking devices are eerily reminiscent of the sci-fi thrillers we’ve all grown up watching, whose frightening images of technology once seemed surrealistically far away.

But now we have officially entered “the future.” And with it comes important choices that will profoundly affect the lives of our children and the progression of our species. The more technology assumes the role of Mother Nature, the less sure I am that we know enough to dabble in such enormous undertakings. Mother Nature is, after all, infallible. We are not.

Right now there is a heavy debate over the safety of genetically modified foods, to which we have no reliable answers. With the media ablaze with child abduction cases recently, people are once again talking heatedly about Verichip, the new identification and tracking device that is implanted under the skin. A rash, fear-induced adoption of yet another questionable technology under the guise of saving lives is unacceptable. Lately, it would seem to me that all of our decisions as Americans have come only under the condition of responding to life-threatening situations. I have to wonder if poorly thought-out acceptance of any easy technological solution that guarantees our safety is a solid move for our future.

Technology has been dedicated to making our lives faster and easier. It has catered to our laziness and impatience to the point where we no longer care to know why and how, as long as we see instant results. As a child, gripping my stuffed animal in front of the television, I watched in horror as the hero painfully removed a flashing tracking device that had been implanted in his brain by the bad guys. This is the stuff horror movies are made of! Devices like these jeopardize our privacy and our freedom to move about anonymously if we so choose, and dehumanizes us by stripping us to a number. Furthermore, what viable guarantee do we have that other information is not being encoded, and that this information is not accessible to outside parties?

On Sept. 3, Martha R. Herbert of the Chicago Times claimed in an article that “we are being exposed to the largest uncontrolled experiment in history.” Genetically modified foods that have not been sufficiently tested are sitting on our supermarket shelves, just waiting to be consumed. These products are not labeled as genetically altered, and as such they are being purchased unwittingly by people who might have otherwise rejected these products. With their novel proteins, there is no way to know what the long term results will be to our health, especially to the still-developing infants that may be being completely sustained on genetically modified soy formulas.

It seems our propensity for technology has finally gotten out of hand. We have sought to curtail nature, if not remove it from our lives by remaking the circle of life to our specifications. We spend billions of dollars to slow aging, cheat death, improve our health without having to lift a finger and inventory ourselves for protective measure. This technological track is detouring us so far from our natural roots that we may never be able to go back and reconnect with rest of nature and all the other creatures with whom we should be sharing existence. I wonder, once we have all been tagged, scanned, and stuffed with questionable substances, will we finally realize that we have been made the ultimate guinea pigs? Installing chips into our children to protect them? I would think there is a better way to ensure the safety of your child — keep a natural, old-fashioned eye on them.