by Mike Gray

Austin Carr, in a technology article at FastCompany cheerfully titled “Iris Scanners Create the Most Secure City in the World. Welcome, Big Brother,” tells us the future is here:

We’ve all seen and obsessively referenced Minority Report, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian future, where the public is tracked everywhere they go, from shopping malls to work to mass transit to the privacy of their own homes. The technology is here. I’ve seen it myself. It’s seen me, too, and scanned my irises.

For the system to work, everyone’s iris scans will have to be entered into a biometric database—but what happens if people balk at it?

For such a Big Brother-esque system, why would any law-abiding resident ever volunteer to scan their irises into a public database, and sacrifice their privacy? GRI [the system developer] hopes that the immediate value the system creates will alleviate any concern. “There’s a lot of convenience to this—you’ll have nothing to carry except your eyes,” says Carter, claiming that consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores. And he has a warning for those thinking of opting out: “When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in.”

This vision of the future eerily matches Minority Report, and GRI knows it. “Minority Report is one possible outcome,” admits Carter. “I don’t think that’s our company’s aim, but I think what we’re going to see is an enviroment well beyond what you see in that movie—minus the precogs, of course.”