Ask Lemmy

The dentist's drill.

Cars, and all the resulting infrastructure.

Ruined city structures and, to an extent, local communities. Small corner stores and tight-knit communities have vanished in favour of giant shopping malls meant to serve everyone in a huge radius.

2 stroke engines as means of transport for teenage boys.

What? No, of course that gathering of mopeds 150m from my apartment building isn't affecting my unbiased opinion on this.

LLMs. Their actual usefulness is so much less than the cost and effort it takes to make the modes. Probably not an unpopular take, especially on this platform.

Dress shoes

Rich people wanted to pretend they always ride horses, so they always wore slim shoes. This became the standard for all shoes, and everyone has been suffering since

Those k-cups, and disposable vapes... You know what? Anything that has disposable in their name.

Yes even baby and feminine products.
Disposable cutlery, disposable bags, FAST fashion, the freaking packaging, the non returnable glass/plastic bottles.

Nuclear bombs.

Surveillance cameras. I get it's a hot topic right now but I've hated them for a long time particularly in work environments. The crimes they prevent have never overcame the abusive relationship I perceive in them

Private health insurance

Plastic

Generative AI. Useless slop.

The concept of proprietary parts.

If your product is so shitty that your plan to make money is to be the only supplier of parts when it breaks theb just fuck off into the sea.

The personal automobile. Hands down the worst thing to happen to humanity until we kill ourselves with nuclear winter later this year.

Not quite technology, unless you factor in the development of cable TV, but 24 hour news networks. That was the start of news as entertainment, as they didn’t have enough to fill 24 hours and had to do whatever they could to get and retain viewers.

Capitalism

McMansions.

Derivatives and other complex financial instruments.

Tools for cheating others out of money, obfuscating transactions or skirting legal restrictions.

I'm still annoyed at that first fish that thought "I wonder if I could live on the land"

Landfills I guess? If the idea of just... disposing of something was never normalized, we might be more conscientious about what we make and what becomes of it when we don't need it any more.

All things plastic disposable.

Generally just over engineering. Cars used to be serviceable but here we are, thousands of small decisions later, decisions that led to things being standardized as far more complicated. Good luck working on a new car.

Same trend is everywhere in society. Websites used to be 20 KB of specially formatted text and maybe 500 KB of images. Now they're literally megs of images and JavaScript and to build one in a modern setting, you're expected to use and install gigs of dependencies. And beyond that we're being asked to burn down rainforests for a half genius/half moron machine to "help" us with the process. This is "more efficient" after all.

Generatige AI and Surveillance Systems

Digital currency to 'replace' physical currency.

Gone are the days of storing physical coins that could increase their value in the future. Instead, we have digital coins with a dog on it and can be lost via hard drives dying.

This also includes items like credit/debit cards, gift cards, and pre-paid cards. A single piece of plastic should hold less value than natural metals like copper and nickel.

Something with actual mass should hold more value than something without mass (data).

Fire. If we couldn't get more calories out of food our calorie hungry brains couldn't develop more and maybe we wouldn't be living in this hellacape

Politicians.

That said, the alternatives on offer seem orders of magnitude worse.

Agriculture was probably the beginning of the end. And while not necessarily a 'technology', the concept of land ownership was a bad idea as well.

AI, and Nukes.

Hmm. That's an interesting one.

In general, I'd say that technological advancement has been desirable. If something isn't desirable, we'll generally just not use it.

Hmm.

I do get people in this thread saying more-or-less some variant on "fossil fuels", because while they've obviously had enormous benefits to humanity, and it's hard to think of something else that has had a comparable positive impact, they're also going to probably have long-standing negative consequences that we cannot trivially overcome. It's hard to think of many things that will have a comparable negative impact.

On the other hand, in 2026, because we've been working on addressing the drawbacks of fossil fuel use recently, I think maybe those negatives carry excessive weight in people's minds. It's also really hard for me to think of many things that have had as positive an effect. It would have been harder and slower for us to have gotten where we are without use of fossil fuels. Maybe even impossible. My own life would almost certainly have been less-pleasant.

thinks more

I think that I'd probably have to pick one of the few technologies that I think could represent an existential threat to humanity. Those have obviously not actually yet given birth to such an event; even the fact that I am writing this means that they have not, and maybe they never will. Maybe the great negative that they represent will forever remain inchoate. But...I think that the threat will likely always be there. At least as of 2026, I don't really see a way for us to ever make the threat go away.

All of them have or have the likely potential to represent some level of great good to humanity. But...I think that if the potential bad that they represent is ever realized, that they will have clearly been a net bad.

Because I don't actually know which, if any of them, would represent such a future bad, it's hard for me to rank them.

Nuclear weapons

In 2026, nuclear weapons, as they have been implemented, probably do not represent an existential threat to humanity. Even if a full-scale nuclear war were to occur and all existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons were to be expended, humanity should still endure. It would be a terrible, horrible event. It would cause civilizations to collapse, death and destruction on a level untold in human history. Humanity after would view the time before as a lost golden age for a long time. But there would be survivors, and eventually, slowly, painfully, humanity could rebuild.

But I think that we probably could build arsenals large enough to end humanity in a nuclear holocaust, and I think that probably no weapons technology to exist in the past has posed a comparable threat. Yes, sure, theoretically humanity could have some sort of death cult that manages to slit everyone else's threat with stone knives, then collectively cut their own, but I think that there, I'd have to credit the death cult, not the weapons technology.

We have limited the rate of spread of nuclear weapons, but we have not stopped their proliferation, and I am not sure that we can. There may come a day when they lead to a world in a situation that is on the brink of a bonfire, and someone strikes a match, and it is nuclear weapons that create a situation that is so on-the-brink that we immolate ourselves without being able to draw back.

There have been benefits. Perhaps the benefits are the least-obvious of the technologies that I list here. They are generally considered to be a factor in the Long Peace, an unprecedented period without war between the major powers. Perhaps that would not have been achieved without humanity developing nuclear weapons; it's hard to know.

I am also not certain that nuclear weapons do pose a likely existential threat. I think that there are many incentives to build nuclear weapons, and that nuclear non-proliferation attempts of the sort that we have tried in the past may fail. We may ultimately wind up with a world where there are many countries involved in a nuclear arms race, and where many countries face incentives to move us closer to a collapse-of-civilization scenario. But it may be that they are not incentivized to build arsenals that are collectively sufficiently large to pose an existential threat to humanity.

This is also the only technology that I'll list that does not involve some sort of self-replication. I think that self-replication is likely one of the most-important aspects of a technology that poses an existential threat to humanity. It's that property that gives it such potential to create scenarios that spiral out-of-control.

[continued in child]

Airplanes.

I shall not elaborate.

~~Translation: I'm just a little hater~~