Consider

This post definitely has nothing to do with the fact that I am frustrated with the constant delays in the Dutch public transport, and that I have had enough time to write TWO blog posts while waiting for my train. I like being vague about whether I am serious in this blog, but I would like to make it clear that I am completely serious in this paragraph.

Even though I struggle with the lack of transport to my city, I am glad we have not invented teleportation just yet. I'm no scientist (which is ironic because I am a data scientist), so I have no interest in the how. I am pretty sure some drunk physicist with their lab coat who have fallen asleep by a desk full of books will wake up at 3am and scream "Eureka!" one day, then design a first prototype before the eviction notice due to repeating noise complaints reach him thanks to the slow bureaucracy in this country.

I am also not interested in the what, who, where, when or why. I think there are things beyond these questions we need to address before we invent this thing. We have a horrible habit of inventing things first and then debating on the laws regarding the said thing. Let's preemptively make the laws for teleportation and get that discussion over with. I don't want to hear the headlines telling us that my country does not have the teleportation technology because the lawmaking process is delaying everything.

I spent half a year to find a house while most of my friends had already moved after a month or two. Why? I was very stubborn and I really opposed the idea of having a roommate. Then I spent an entire year happy for owning my very own front door. (Not to brag but I also own the inside of the house, not just the door.) This could change drastically once you put the teleportation in the equation.

Everywhere around the world would be within reach, in the matter of seconds maybe. Cool. You could travel from the country Georgia to the United States's united state Georgia in the blink of an eye faster than any George in the history could. Amazing. But what prevents any George from teleporting inside your living room? Do we casually agree that all eight billion of us are roommates and give an oath that we will respect each other's private space?

I don't want a stranger George to enjoy my house's facilities for free and without my consent when I am doing all housework alone over here. There are days I feel too lazy to clean up my dishes and now that anyone can just hop into my kitchen, I would live with the stress of someone noticing the pile of plates and embarrassing me publicly. Yes, publicly in my own house. At this point, would I be considered the only tenant here?

The fact that someone might be listening to my horrible singing in the shower while I think I am alone in the house would scare me so much. I suppose this is not a concern specific to teleportation as my phone probably has listened to me for years already. Google might have collected enough data to make a text-to-speech bot from my voice so maybe they don't even need to listen to me in shower to hear my singing anyways. I suddenly feel watched.

Alright. Let's put the narcissism aside and stop entertaining the fact that a tech giant such as Google would spend any time and resources just to imitate a person who is as insignificant as myself. Even if they steal my bank account with that kind of technology, the money in the bank would not even pay for the electricity bill they spent to hack me.

Speaking of banks, how would they secure the money anymore? Would anything be considered as a vault when everyone has physical access to anything? Would we truly go for a digital currency if that were to happen? And since you can go steal anything anyways, would money be worth anything at all?

I guess not. Teleportation simply makes locations and positions irrelevant. Every place could be here. Everything too would be here. Assuming there is enough supply still, money and monetary value would lose all of its meaning. Everything would be hypothetically free. Maybe we would guard the valuables in close proximity and stop any person who teleported in, from taking the items with them.

I am not convinced that in a world like this, farmers and other manufacturers would actually continue production. Someone is going to come steal the goods, or they themselves will just go steal someone else's. That sounds like an entire economical collapse all of a sudden. A risk not worth taking. For the sake of this blog post, I will keep assuming there will still be production in the sense we are used to.

My other assumption would be that the technology is publicly available. Considering the dangers, I highly doubt it would open to public. At least, not for free or without inspection similar to how we get into the planes. I don't like that the government would have access to something so powerful such as this though. It's not like they can take everything I own if they really wanted to already, but the imminency of it happening would keep me awake at night.

I also feel like there would be some backlash from the lobbies related to transportation. They would basically run out of customers. I initially thought you still need public transport to get to the teleportation machine, but what stops some personnel from teleporting to your place with the machine then teleporting you to the destination? That could be a very bizarre job to be honest. In the end, only those personnel and some retro public transport lines would remain. Some people do actually like road trips. If I understood anything from the current economical system, someone would capitalize on it quick.

I said I am not interested in the how; but seriously, how? Where does the air go in the place you've just teleported to? What if you teleport into a wall? Into another person? In the same exact place that you started teleporting? To somewhere with no electricity? How is this machine calibrated so perfectly? How do we supply the energy required to run this machine so many times per day? Where are you during teleportation? Are you some molecules travelling at light speed? Do you die and get reconstructed on the other side? (This time the other side also being on Earth.) That would surely hurt. If your copy is created at the destination, is that still you?

As mentioned, too many remains unresolved. Lawmakers and clearly scientist need to consider quite a lot of things before this can really happen. Unless we have a scheme to address all the issues I listed, maybe it is good that we did not invent teleportation just yet. Or did we?