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Hearing from the leaders of the tech world is always revealing, and very often surprising. In our second annual Silicon Valley Insiders Poll, a panel of 101 executives, innovators, and thinkers weigh in on some of the biggest technological, political, and cultural questions of the moment.
So when we ran an unscientific poll of leaders and thinkers in tech, we had to ask: Which technology do you wish you could un-invent? What innovation do you think should go "back in the box" and be banished forever?
The two winning responses were: selfie sticks and nuclear weapons.
But let's go through some runners-up first.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/what-would-you-un-invent/413818/
Which inventions would Soylentils like to un-invent?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday November 06 2015, @10:37AM
It's a tough question.
Credit Default Swaps?
Plutonium (half-life 29 000 years)?
The microwave crowd-frying cannon [wikipedia.org], coming soon to a demonstration near you?
Mind reading scanners? I know that they don't exist yet, but fMRI gets more and more accurate each year, and who knows what breakthroughs EPFL's Blue Brain will make in mapping small bits of cortex.
And if you could scan someone's mind, you could undermine the enormously important fundamental human concept of Die Gedanken sind frei [wikipedia.org].
It would enable the creation of a dictatorship that you'd never get rid of anymore, unless you could bribe the people *behind* the scanners (guess what kind of people would end up operating those scanners?)
Also, I agree with the people who nominated leaded petrol, and landmines.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday November 06 2015, @05:05PM
Plutonium wasn't really "invented." It's a naturally-occurring (rare) element that was discovered and refined.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday November 06 2015, @06:50PM
Pu does not occur naturally. It is mostly made in nuclear reactors. An early nuclear scientist made the comment that at one time he held the World's entire stock of Pu in a test tube in his cupboard.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday November 06 2015, @10:51PM
Plutonium is the heaviest primordial element by virtue of its most stable isotope, plutonium-244, whose half-life of about 80 million years is just long enough for the element to be found in trace quantities in nature. Plutonium is much more common on Earth since 1945 as a product of neutron capture and beta decay, where some of the neutrons released by the fission process convert uranium-238 nuclei into plutonium-239.
End of the second lead paragraph on Wikipedia.
Pu-244 [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday November 06 2015, @11:21PM
I didn't know that, I thought Thorium and Uranium were the last natural actinides [wikipedia.org].
Learn something new every day :-)
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Friday November 06 2015, @08:51PM
I'm working on a wireless cell phone charger that harvests the microwave energy from crowd control weapons. I intend it to be worn like a vest, initially, but the tinfoil hat form factor has merit, too.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 06 2015, @09:06PM
Eh, plutonium isn't so bad - I mean sure it could give you heavy metal poisoning, and it might have other toxic effects, (I have no idea) but lead is far worse and we saturated the environment with it thanks to leaded gasoline.
As far as radiation is concerned - the longer the half-life the less of an issue it is. It's really only once the half-life gets down into the range of years that things start getting unhealthy, and the *really* dangerous stuff has half-lives in the range of days or less.
Where it becomes an issue with waste disposal is that we tend to store the long-half-life stuff mixed in with the much shorter-lived waste, and as the short-lived stuff irradiates the surroundings it causes the long-lived stuff to fission, creating new short-lived waste. Store the long-lived stuff alone and it's just so much heavy metal. Or better yet, separate it out and feed it back into a reactor, that's valuable fuel there. It was only discarded because the reactor wasn't designed to operate with a lot of waste-products present.