Can Technology Help Eradicate Evil?

The future holds many promises. Within my lifetime, I expect to experience a fully networked world, a life of abundance, and may live keep my health for more than a century. While technocrats and futurists discuss engineering marvels and world-changing API's, what can be done about humanity's dark side?Slavery has existed in some form or another throughout the few thousand years we claim to be "civilized." A well documented practice in stone age cultures, it is believed slavery was practiced far back in prehistory. The great civilizations of mankind kept slaves of some form, whether bought in markets or taken as the spoils of victory over opponents.The recent incident in Nigeria, where over 300 girls were abducted from their school, brings the word slavery back into the modern global context. Not that slavery has ever left, but for advanced countries, it has faded into the background of other fears. Living in an extremely safe part of America, I carry a fear my daughter may not come home today, but the chances of this happening are so low that there is a far greater chance of a car accident in the few miles from daycare to home than of criminals abducting her.Through our ancestors' moral ambiguity, slavery existed because it could and continues to exist today because it can. The willingness to enslave others will continue to exist because some humans are so broken, either by genetic makeup or the failed nurturing they received as children or even some major change in their adult life, that they are incapable of viewing others as equals. In the case of these schoolgirls, they have been stripped of their lives, their families, and face a life with few choices at all.One of the benefits of civilization is the organization to shine a light on the darkness where evil thrives. In our modern times, a time where slavery has been officially outlawed in every country, global estimates of the number of slaves are somewhere between 12 and 30 million with the practice split into three types, including debt slaves, forced labor, and trafficked slaves.While Boko Haram plans to use the kidnapped girls as trafficked slaves, sold to sick individuals living in regions where slavery is not actively controlled or they have enough political influence to practice slavery above the law, children as young as four are often given to work off the debts of family members in other countries. In Cambodia, women are known to sell their daughters into sex slavery to pay off debts. UNICEF estimates 13,000-30,000 children work in the country's sex industry.As technological advancements continue to network each of us, moving beyond physical addresses to digital connections and mobile tracking services, the issues of privacy come up quite often. We stand on the verge of losing all privacy as the networked world becomes capable of tracking every movement outside of our homes and many movements within it.The truth is, this loss of privacy has been happening for some time. Tax records, the census, credit card purchases, telephone calls, browser histories, and mobile phone location tracking have slowly increased the ability to track ever greater details of our lives. Facebook has been accused of tracking our thoughts, including likes, dislikes, political views, purchasing history, and even emotional triggers. Future advancements may track our meals, heart rate, what our eyes focus on, and even be able to record our unspoken thoughts. All of these will erode our privacy in ways for corporations to profit from our data by marketing directly to us, and by governments using this data to prosecute legitimate crime and/or exercise coercive prosecution.My gut reaction as an American, living in the 'Land of the Free,' is to defend freedom, of which privacy plays a large role, with every breath. As a realist, I have to acknowledge there are different types of freedom. Would Nigerian parents, well aware of the local, immediate threats to their children, be willing to add a digital tracker to each child? Would they be okay with a system capable of tracking every civilian's whereabouts and communications if it provided much greater, if not perfect, security? I, at least, suspect they would consider it, weighing benefits against real-world fears.After all, there are freedoms and there are freedoms. In the end, I imagine every person will need to weigh the benefits of keeping their lives private vs the freedom from worry that your child may not come home today.__________Read 'The Escape' for my view of how near-future technology might offer a better chance of survival than what obviously exists today in too many parts of the world.