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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.
8. 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.
1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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.
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. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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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