Well, I wrote this like it would be said in a speaech, bit technically it's an essay. Enjoy:
A few days ago, my friend pulled out a potato chip from a packet. That potato chip changed my world forever. It had remarkably similar shape and features to that of the Eifel tower. We joked around, gazing in awe at the precise marks of the towers supports and levels; observation decks and it even had the black marks around the base for the four legs. We ended up looking on the internet, and finding out that our version of the Eifel tower was a little abstract, and my friend ate the chip. It tasted bad, she said, because it had all of our guys’ germs on it. Aw gee, thanks for that.
But my point is, the way we are heading, there won’t be any more Eifel tower chips – there won’t be any chips shaped like anything original. Ever. The world is changing, and it’s going in a direction that looks painfully dull. In today’s world, everyone has heard of genetic engineering. Heck, most people have even seen a photo of Dolly the sheep, the first ever sentient being cloned in a lab. And if you can clone a sheep, then it won’t be that hard to clone a potato. In fact, it’s happening right now, natures own way of weeding out the weak potatoes, and providing us with the fittest potatoes around.
Potatoes reproduce asexually. This means that one single parent plant grows a bud and passes its genetic material down to the child plant, without any change in genetic material. These two potatoes are the exact same, genetically. But it won’t be long before us humans go and mess about with things, picking the finest potatoes in the bunch and doing a little bit of selective breeding. It won’t even be long before whole countries are growing genetically identical potatoes, because they just happen to be the best potatoes around. Everywhere.
But hold on, just because they are genetically identical doesn’t mean that they will grow the same, will it? Take identical twins for example – they are just as cloned as the potatoes, but they grow up to do different things, to meet different people, to lead different lives. Yes, that’s right. But you’re not taking into account the effect of the technological age. We have machines which make coffee, do our laundry, package our peanuts and, of course, get the finest cow dung in the bunch (then again, all cows will be the same, because they breed the best milk, eat the least grass and have the most calves) and mix it into a fine ratio that we humans happen to call fertilizer. And there will be no point in waiting for sunlight when we could have the exact same artificial light hanging over the potatoes day and night, speeding up their growth. If all fertilizer is the perfect ratio, and we have machines which perfectly spread it evenly along our perfect potato fields, under perfectly fitted bright lights, then what’s to say that every potato (perfect clones of each other, remember) won’t turn out to be the exact same potatoes?
Nothing.
And if you remember that machines are programmed to do everything the exact same, time and time again (especially on production lines) then what’s to say that every potato won’t end up cut the exact same as every other potato? What’s to say that when they get sent to be seasoned, cooked, and packaged, they won’t turn out to be the exact same then? I would go as far as to say that the only individual interference will be the grubby little fingers of yours picking through the bags on the supermarket shelf. But with Online shopping, who’s to say that there will still be any supermarkets? Instead, there may just be machines, programmed to pack them the exact same way as every other packet. And who would bother to drive a truck full of groceries when there is a perfectly safe robot, willing to drive the exact same way… The way technology is headed, there might be no human interaction with the product until it arrives on your doorstep.
And let me just say that - in this world not so far away - potato chips will be the least of our worries.
