How will people approach person beamed from a past?

Question inspired by movies Minority Report and Her

The year is 2050, USA: The future is "realistically optimistic": We, the humans, have steady progress in computers and AI: We use wearable AI, which can communicate with us using natural human language.

We also use self-driving cars and hoverboards. Several more terrorist attack in the twenties also motivated people to be registered in the system by their retina scans.

The retina scanning devices came up in 2033, so by year 2050 you have 99.999 % population of the USA "in the system." Only people left are ultra orthodox Amish communities, but they went for trade-off: You leave us alone in specific area and we will never leave it. If we leave it, we will do so only through assigned checkpoints which means our retina will be scanned.

By 2050, majority (above 70%) of people confirm transactions by their retina. While "good old classic" credit cards are still in use, they are used only by minority of people. Paper money are gone by now. (You may assume cryptocurrencies replacing paper money)

Year 2015, current day: Joe the Average, has some real trouble: He was warped to year 2050 by accident (time travel is plot device, so it just happened without explanation how or why)

Joe Average appears in generally crowded area of USA (I don't want to go Times Square, NY, but the place should be pretty busy) at broad daylight.

The question

I assume people will fear of Joe, because he is not in any database. And boy, his retina will be scanned in 5 seconds after he appears (and trigger alarm)

I know that homeland security, police and FBI will go "full red alarm" because of this (Assume fear of terrorists and knowledge that "lone white guy can be terrorist too")

Now: What should I change in the setup in order to let Joe survive?

After thinking about above story, I immediately started to assume that Joe would be killed by security force.

In the story, I want to give him rough start, but generally I would like to let him survive in order to discover shiny year 2050.

P.S: Joe appears "generally harmless" and I do not assume some huge language progress from 2015 to 2050, so communicating should be not an obstacle.

Also, retina scanning technology by 2050 is so progressed, that it can recognize any human "in real time"

posted almost 9 years ago

Pavel Janicek‭

6 reputation 38 0 1 0