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5. Cosmetic implants
There is something scarily aberrant about puffing up living human flesh by implanting large
amounts of an alien substance. Not that people will sacrifice vanity – of course that is out of
the question – but any truly advanced medical technology would simply grow the flesh into the
desired shape, using the human metabolism as opposed to injections of window putty. Silicone's
mimicry of flesh – and the same goes for gel, saline and collagen – is simply too crude for
genuinely cosmetic purposes.
6. Land mines
The planet is already cluttered with well-meaning non-governmental organisations protesting about
land mines. Their plaint makes perfect sense when you realise that land mines are ideally suited to
blowing up peacemakers once a war is over.
During a war, few soldiers step on land mines because mines are placed by enemies waiting with
rifles. Once the armies demob, though – and armies always do – land mines don't kill combatants any
more. They kill livestock, the brighter and more exploratory kinds of children, and the men and
women who wander around after soldiers, attempting to restore the planet to habitability.
There is something to be said for the practice of automating bombs so that people can get killed
without any human intervention. After all, there's a long technical trend there, and it strongly
favours advanced societies with engineers over those among us who merely pick up hoes and axes in
fits of tribal rage. But it's stupid to manufacture and spread lethal devices that don't know when a
war is over.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some technologies are so blatantly obnoxious that the human race would rejoice if they were
summarily executed. Humorist and science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling offers some candidates.
Technologies die rather routinely - seen a covered wagon lately? - but it's rare for them to be
singled out and righteously put to death. Some technologies, however, are so blatantly obnoxious
that the human race would rejoice if they were obliterated. A wise society would honour its young
technical innovators for services rendered in annihilating obsolete technologies that are the
dangerous hangovers of previous, less advanced generations. Let me offer some candidates.
7. Nuclear weapons
One can make some sound arguments for nuclear power – medical radioisotopes are quite handy, while
far-travelling spacecraft can barely function on anything less – but there is no reason for us to go
on pretending that we need to fry entire chunks of continents. Not only are nuclear weapons
technically clumsy, but they betray a blatant death wish better suited to al Qaeda than a
civilisation.
These days, a well-organised state can deftly obliterate any conceivable target with exquisite GPS
accuracy. Conventional "daisy-cutters" and cluster bombs can be scaled up to any size or potency
that the military might need. This leaves nuclear bombs with only one ideal function: terrorism.
They are excellent weapons for non-governmental predators to deploy against centres of government.
They are quite useless for governments to deploy against terrorists. So why are governments still
manufacturing these expensive, dangerous, easily stolen objects?
If all nuclear weapons vanished tomorrow, the world's current military situation would not be
affected one whit. The United States would still be military top boss. Yet we'd be much less likely
to wake up one morning to find Paris or Washington missing.
8. The internal-combustion engine
I have to confess that, as a former denizen of the 20th century, I'll miss the loud, soul-
stirring THRAAAAGH of a two-stroke motorcycle. And litre for litre, kilojoule for kilojoule,
petrol is truly the queen of liquid fuels. Nevertheless, if you stand inside a closed garage with
any internal-combustion engine, it will kill you. That is bad. Even the best such engines emit an
eye-watering stink.
Internal-combustion engines are big and clumsy. They are hard to tune and they waste a lot of
effort carrying their own weight. They've got a great incumbent fuelling system built into place,
but they need to be replaced by hydrogen and fuel cells, technologies that are simpler, safer and
cleaner. If you need really loud, macho engine noises, why not just record them and play them on
your car stereo?
9. Prisons
It's rather out of style to suggest that people who transgress might be rehabilitated if treated
decently. But even if criminals are to be relentlessly punished, removed from the sight of decent
people and kept in a giant ghetto, there are better, cheaper and more efficient ways than the
ones we have.
Newfangled electronic-parole monitors and ubiquitous computing offer plenty of opportunities. These
certainly needn't be seen as sissified kinds of constraints; they could be just as cruel and unusual
as anyone might like.
Lose your internal visa (formerly known as a "driver's licence"😉 and you soon find that merchants
won't take your credit, that aircraft won't transport you, that for all your sunny smiles and good
behaviour, you are under heavy constraints. Many airports have become incarceration centres in all
but name, plus you can get a drink there and listen to Muzak. So why do we go through these same
ritual gestures with the iron bars, uniforms and transport trucks? Technically, it's redundant.
10. Incandescent light bulbs
In reality, these sad devices are "heat bulbs". Supposedly a lighting technology, they produce nine
times more raw heat than they do illumination. The light they do give, admittedly, is still prettier
than the eerie glow of compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes. But it's still a far cry from
the glories of natural daylight.
Plus there's the cost of light bulbs, their fragility, the replacement overhead, the vast waste
of energy, glass and tungsten, the goofy hassle of running air-conditioners to do battle with
the blazing heat of all these round little glass stoves ... let's face it, these gizmos deserve
to vanish.
They will be replaced by a superior technology, something cheap, cool and precisely engineered, that
emits visible wavelengths genuinely suited to a consumer's human eyeball. Our descendants will stare
at those vacuum-shrouded wires as if they were whale-oil lanterns.
11. Cosmetic implants
There is something scarily aberrant about puffing up living human flesh by implanting large
amounts of an alien substance. Not that people will sacrifice vanity – of course that is out of
the question – but any truly advanced medical technology would simply grow the flesh into the
desired shape, using the human metabolism as opposed to injections of window putty. Silicone's
mimicry of flesh – and the same goes for gel, saline and collagen – is simply too crude for
genuinely cosmetic purposes.
12. DVDs
The DVD was the most eagerly adopted electronic consumer gizmo in history, but I'd feel bad if I
failed to complain about the evil of these things. First and worst, DVDs are unbearably frail. Any
benefit one gets from "clearer pictures" – on what HDTV superscreen, exactly? – is quickly removed
by the catastrophic effects of a single thumbprint or scratch. Plus, just like CDs, DVDs as physical
objects will prove to warp and delaminate.
Most loathsome of all is the fiendish spam hard-burned into DVDs, which forces one to suffer through
the commercials gratefully evaded by videotape fast-forwards. The Content Scrambling System copy
protection scheme doesn't work, and the payoff for pirating DVDs is huge because, unlike tapes,
digital data don't degrade with reproduction. So DVDs have the downside of piracy and organised
crime, without the upside of free, simple distribution. Some day they will stand starkly revealed
for what they really are: collateral damage to consumers in the entertainment industry's miserable,
endless war of attrition with digital media.
13. Lie detectors
They just plain don't work. They might have some vague use in increasing the psychological stress of
a subject under interrogation, but galvanic skin response and heart rate have little to do with the
process of lying. The use of lie detectors is basically a voodoo ritual that allows large
institutions to lie to themselves about the trustworthiness of their employees.
Even if lie detectors did work – say, with newfangled nuclear magnetic-resonance brain scans – they
would become an Orwellian intrusion. Furthermore, there would likely be a social revolution as major
actors in society, from top to bottom, had to admit to fabricating their lives out of spin and
wishful thinking. The official public version of our means, motives and opportunities is severely
divorced from the private world of our interior thoughts. If we were forced to confront and reveal
our brain functions through technological means, most of us would soon discover that we led half-
baked lives of quiet intellectual desperation, in which little thought of any kind ever took place.
14. Land mines
The planet is already cluttered with well-meaning non-governmental organisations protesting about
land mines. Their plaint makes perfect sense when you realise that land mines are ideally suited to
blowing up peacemakers once a war is over.
During a war, few soldiers step on land mines because mines are placed by enemies waiting with
rifles. Once the armies demob, though – and armies always do – land mines don't kill combatants any
more. They kill livestock, the brighter and more exploratory kinds of children, and the men and
women who wander around after soldiers, attempting to restore the planet to habitability.
There is something to be said for the practice of automating bombs so that people can get killed
without any human intervention. After all, there's a long technical trend there, and it strongly
favours advanced societies with engineers over those among us who merely pick up hoes and axes in
fits of tribal rage. But it's stupid to manufacture and spread lethal devices that don't know when a
war is over.
15. Coal-based power
Coal isn't so much a "technology" as a whole school of them, all bad or worse. Coal was the
primeval fuel of the industrial revolution. Coal powered the first steam engines, whose killer app
was pumping stagnant water out of coal mines. It powered the railroads, whose killer app was
moving coal.
Unfortunately, we've been doing this coal trick for some 200 years, and coal is getting uglier by
the day. If your accountants rival those of Enron, you can claim that coal is a cheap fuel. Add in
acid rain, climate damage and medical costs, and it swiftly becomes dead obvious that coal is a
menace. Coal spews more weather-wrecking pollutants into the air per unit of energy than any other
fossil fuel. Extracting coal destroys vast tracts of land. Coal mining is one of the world's most
dangerous jobs.
If coal vanished tomorrow, we'd miss it: the US would lose a quarter of its energy supplies; in
Australia, it would be closer to 50%. But that shortfall, daunting though it is, cannot compare with
the ghastly prospect of blackened skies over China and seas rising out of their beds. The sooner we
rid ourselves of this destructive addiction, the less we will have to regret.
16. Manned spaceflight
One hates to see this dazzling technology go, but when one resolutely sets the romance aside,
there's not a lot left. Thanks to decades of biological research, it's quite clear that flying
around the solar system is bad for one's health. Without the healthy stresses of gravity on one's
skeleton, human bones decay just as they do during prolonged bed rest, while muscles atrophy. Cosmic
rays blast through spacecraft walls and human bodies, while solar flares will fry astronauts as
diligently as any nuclear bomb. I won't mention the fact that spacecraft are inherently rickety and
dangerous, because that's a major part of their attraction.
China has just sent its first "taikonaut" into orbit to belatedly become the world's third manned
space power. As a test of national will and skill, Chinese spaceflight is vastly preferable to, say,
invading Taiwan. I promise to watch Chinese manned spaceflight with great interest, and I might even
buy the mission patch and stickers, but frankly, there isn't much there. There haven't been men or
women out of low-Earth orbit in some 30 solid years. We don't seem to miss them in any way that is
quantifiable.
There is little point in stepping onto the Moon, leaving flags and footprints, then retreating once
again. The staggering price of shipping a kilogram into orbit has not come down in decades. In the
meantime, unmanned spacecraft grow smaller and more capable every year. Until we bioengineer
ourselves to enjoy cosmic rays, or until we've got rockets that can lift a Winnebago made of solid
lead, this technology belongs on the museum shelf.
Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author, journalist and cultural critic based in Austin, Texas.
2003 Technology Review, Inc. All rights reserved.
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