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: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 06 2015, @02:32PM
Incorrect. The problem with a lot of shitty technologies is that they're used because of non-technical reasons, usually inertia. If everyone got rid of them tomorrow and switched to something else, they wouldn't want to go back.
For example, suppose we somehow finally got rid of fax machines everywhere, perhaps simply by banning them and having stormtroopers raid every medical clinic and law office and real estate office and seize the damn things, and destroy them all. All these places would suddenly be forced to move to better methods of transmitting documents, like, oh, scanners and PDFs and email like the rest of us have been using for over a decade?? Once they got those processes in place (and the laws were forcibly changed to allow this, since faxed signatures are legally binding for some dumb reason), no one would want to go back to needing a landline and transmitting pages with horrible resolution and graphical artifacts, leading to completely illegible pages.