10 Horrifying Technolgies that shouldn't ever exist...coming soon

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1. Weaponized Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology theorist Robert Freitas has brainstormed several possible variations of planet-killing nanotech, including aerovores (a.k.a. grey dust), grey plankton, grey lichens, and so-called biomass killers. Aeorovores would blot out all sunlight, grey plankton would consist of seabed-grown replicators that eat up land-based carbon-rich ecology, grey lichens would destroy land-based geology, and biomass killers would attack various organism

2. Conscious Machines

One of the best things about computers is that you can make them sum a million columns in a spreadsheet without them getting resentful or bored. Since we plan to use artificial intelligence in place of human intellectual labor, I think it would be immoral to purposely program it to be conscious. Trapping a conscious being inside a machine and forcing it to do work for you is isomorphic to slavery.

3. Artificial Superintelligence

4. Time Travel

5. Mind Reading Devices

Last year, for example, scientists from the Netherlands used brain scan data and computer algorithms to determine which letters a person was looking at. The breakthrough hinted at the potential for a third party to reconstruct human thoughts at an unprecedented level of detail, including what we see, think, and remember. Such devices, if used en masse by some kind of totalitarian regime or police state, would make life intolerable. It would introduce an Orwellian world in which our "thought crimes" could actually be enforced.

6. Brain Hacking Devices

Incredibly, we've already taken the first steps toward this goal. Recently, an international team of neuroscientists set up an experiment that allowed participants to engage in brain-to-brain communication over the Internet. Sure, it's exciting, but this tech-enabled telepathy could open a pandora's box of problems. Perhaps the best — and scariest — treatment of this possibility was portrayed in Ghost in the Shell, in which an artificially intelligent hacker was capable of modifying the memories and intentions of its victims. Now imagine such a thing in the hands of organized crime and paranoid governments.

7. Autonomous Robots Designed to Kill Humans

Unlike remote-controlled drones, military robots could identify targets and destroy them without a human giving the final order to shoot. The dangers of such technology should be obvious, but it goes beyond the immediate threat of "friendly fire" incidents in which robots mistakenly kill people from their own side of a conflict, or even innocent civilians.

8. Weaponized Pathogens

9. Virtual Prisons and Punishment

...[Uploading] the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals' lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time. Further, the eight-and-a-half hour 1,000-year sentence could be followed by a few hours (or, from the point of view of the criminal, several hundred years) of treatment and rehabilitation. Between sunrise and sunset, then, the vilest criminals could serve a millennium of hard labour and return fully rehabilitated either to the real world (if technology facilitates transferring them back to a biological substrate) or, perhaps, to exile in a computer simulated world.

10. Hell Engineering

It's a prospect that's particularly chilling when you consider lifespans of indefinite length, along with the nearly boundless possibilities for psychological and physical anguish.

I think some of these will come sooner than we think. Almost anything we can imagine can come in to fruition. How long will it be until we see these? Maybe some are already here...

Almost anything we can imagine can come in to fruition

One time I told my father "anything is possible if you can think it you can do it"

To that he replied oh bull shyt you cant walk to the moon no matter how much you think about it.

That kind of killed my anything is possible days.

a reply to: alienjuggalo

Haha I like that one. You should have replied that it could be possible one day to spacewalk to the moon in a suit.

a reply to: fictitious

Well. Pretty much everything on that list 'could' happen, even time travel.
But will it ever take off? I highly doubt it.

a reply to: strongfp

I'm curious as to why you doubt it. Just a few decades ago plenty people doubted we would make it into space or create something as far fetched as the internet, yet it happened in the matter of a few years.

a reply to: fictitious

Some of this amounts to predictions from the 20th century where we'd be driving flying cars, because, hey, why not.

An AI that chooses to feel pain or whatever, isn't AI. Some grossly misconstrue what it would be like, by simply copying and pasting very basic -human- things onto AI. Anthropomorphising. "What if these AI suffer because they want to have sex and they can't?" Why would they. Oh, they just want to be human, right. Makes sense since this is all we know, but certainly lacking in depth or critical thought.

And as far as the idea of the sped up time or whatever and having that much time for rehabilitation, part of that, probably a large part of that, is changes in the neurons and connections between them, which certainly, the extent that it would need to, would -not- be happening in several hours.

If we had heard about the large hadron collider, microchip identification, weather control, cloning...(and all the other weird things we have gotten used to) before they existed, we would have said "no way" so, yes all of this can happen, and some of it probably already exists.

It's like reading my shopping list for world domination.
Just missing the Robotic Monkey Assassin Squad.

It's all very possible.
The conscious AI would be cruel.

a reply to: 222mockingbirdlane

Some good points there. Notice how everything has gone very quiet on the cloning side of things lately? I wonder what they are up to.

Time travel maybe wouldn't be possible, as there are so many problems in it. If we are living in the Multiverse, it is not possible to travel back in time, as "time" doesn't really exist, its just the effect of new dimensions forming. That is why we cannot travel back in time, because past doesn't exist, it has already decayed. It is not possible toward future either, as that dimension is not possibly formed yet.

And if time travel is possible, why we haven't seen any obvious time travellers? Surely even when time machines would be strictly protected, curiosity would win and there would be people illegally using these machines to travel past. So if time travel would be possible in the future, where are time travellers? Do they have invisibility devices or something?

Limited time travel is possible, if we could create supermassive black hole, as massive objects bend space and time. Time basically slows down near any massive object, but it doesn't reverse. Near the event horizon of black hole, time goes really, really slow. If you would end up in black hole, observer would see you stopped, but you would experience it in real time, you wouldn't notice time slowing at all. To observer it would take almost infinite time to fall in black hole. Time would ultimately stop at event horizon. This is if black holes exist, as there is not any solid proof of black holes. They are just a theory.

originally posted by: Thebel


And if time travel is possible, why we haven't seen any obvious time travellers?

I like to entertain the idea that if they DID travel, it was to change something. If they succeeded in changing something, we'd never know in the now because all the past would be altered but would be 'normal' to us. The only ones who would know something had been changed would be those who sent the person back - even then they'd have to mind wipe I would assume.

Imagine making a career out of changing the past. If you had to remember how everything was originally, man...... you'd never keep the time lines straight and folks would lock ya up in a mental ward.

maybe that's why some ARE in a mental ward.

Do you see what your post did to me? It made me start thinking all deep and odd and stuff.

Everytime I hear A.I mentioned The Terminator movies and I.Robot comes to mind. I really don't think creating machines that are more intelligent and powerful than us is a great idea.

As for cloning they managed to clone that sheep (Dolly was it?) so I've got no doubts that human cloning will have taken place behind closed doors.

originally posted by: alienjuggalo

Almost anything we can imagine can come in to fruition

One time I told my father "anything is possible if you can think it you can do it"

To that he replied oh bull shyt you cant walk to the moon no matter how much you think about it.

That kind of killed my anything is possible days.

you can so walk to the moon. You just need a long enough path. And thats where technology comes in.

Now swimming to the moon, that you can't do.

originally posted by: sarra1833

originally posted by: Thebel


And if time travel is possible, why we haven't seen any obvious time travellers?

I like to entertain the idea that if they DID travel, it was to change something. If they succeeded in changing something, we'd never know in the now because all the past would be altered but would be 'normal' to us. The only ones who would know something had been changed would be those who sent the person back - even then they'd have to mind wipe I would assume.

Imagine making a career out of changing the past. If you had to remember how everything was originally, man...... you'd never keep the time lines straight and folks would lock ya up in a mental ward.

maybe that's why some ARE in a mental ward.

Do you see what your post did to me? It made me start thinking all deep and odd and stuff.

I don't think ever going back would be possible, the universe just wouldn't allow it, the Grandfather paradox being a great example.

If it was possible I agree though, I think that the only person who would notice the changes would be the traveller themselves. I'd like to think of it similar to the movie ''The Butterfly Effect'' where once the universe realises the error the traveller rapidly gets the missing memories rammed into the brain.

How strange? My reply to 'anything is possible' is; can you jump to the moon? It stems from a Learn-to-read book I read in primary school where some Arab King attempted to build a long ladder to climb to the moon....and failed

a reply to: alienjuggalo

originally posted by: alienjuggalo

Almost anything we can imagine can come in to fruition

One time I told my father "anything is possible if you can think it you can do it"

To that he replied oh bull shyt you cant walk to the moon no matter how much you think about it.

That kind of killed my anything is possible days.

Moon Elevator. You'd have to walk to the Elevator, and walk out once there...would have probably got you slapped, though.

As far as number 5, I'd love to have a VCR-like device that could record my dreams, so I can play them back later if I forget what the dream is about.

There was an episode of Deep Space Nine that dealt with Number 9, where Miles O'Brien was kept in a virtual prison for 20 years while only a couple of hours passed in the real world. It drove him to attempt suicide after he got out toward the end of the episode.

a reply to: fictitious

great thread! s & f from me.

have you heard about this?

Contact Lens with Transparent Circuitry

now including the above, that is 11 horrifying technologies that should never exist!

a reply to: fictitious

I can't say I consider any of the technology we've created as "far fetched", in fact I think every one of those listed technologies (except one) could be completed in the near future or maybe it already exists...

However we will never achieve sentient machines. It's a pipe dream. The human race itself is the harbinger of death; creating life is so far from us, it's not even worth discussing. Just to be clear here, I'm not talking about A.I. I'm talking about sentient, conscious machines which can question their own existence and perceive beyond the scope of their programming.

Machines will never be more then clever automatons.