I had a terrible dream last night that someone was trying to take my child away from me. When I got up this morning, I crawled into bed with Anna (after removing 12 of her 34 stuffed animals) and snuggled her for a long time.
The picture above appeared in the April issue of Wired on their "Predict What's Next" page. They asked readers to envision Child Safety Gear From the Future, this example being from 2019.
This monthly feature is intended to be a social barometer and make us feel guilty about where the world is headed and it usually does. Personally, though, I like the idea of a child locator. I think most parents are actually concerned about their child's safety and not the cost of ransom, but that doesn't get as many laughs. Why not implant a little locator into your child's foot? We do it for pets, right?
What are your thoughts?
That is disturbing and I don't know why. It's just kind of creepy.
ReplyDeleteYou wouldn't do that for peace of mind? :)
ReplyDeleteMy dog and my cat both have a chip with our information on it so that if they get lost and end up at a humane society somewhere the people thare can (hopefully) call me. But I think part of this is because they can't talk and tell the nice humane society person their address. Of course the chips in my pets don't connect to a satallite and transmit their location.
ReplyDeleteWe also a similar kind of chip in the transgenic mice I made for my dissertation project--you wave a wand over a cage of mice and figure out which one is which (since I had to do genetic testing on every single one of them and we didn't have room/couldn't afford to keep 1000 seperate cages to keep them all straight. Those also did not have satallite uplink, however.
My two big concerns would be: If someone is trying to help a child get home-you won't need one. If someone is trying to snatch the child--they would have to cut the chip out. Then the child is still being kidnapped and is now bleeding as well--not a nice image
Secondly- people are paranoid about their cellphones giving them cancer and most people don't have their cellphone implanted under their skin as a child. What does it do to the surrounding cells to have a constant satallite uplink to your child's body...
(Maybe you could implant it into the teddy bear/blanket/favorite toy they take with them everywhere instead)
I would just worry about the toy getting left behind. Excellent point about the cancer. I hadn't thought about that. I had thought about the kidnapper cutting, but I was thinking it would go just under the surface in the foot or something, so it wouldn't be much to cut. Wow. Listen to me. Hopefully, someone can come up with a good solution that doesn't involve cancer or bleeding. :)
ReplyDelete