Technology has moved past the point of diminishing returns, and the needs of technological development have overtaken the needs of biological life. This has resulted in malignant inventions that have more downsides that upsides.
In this article, I present ten such inventions, some of which are slightly related. Of course, any one of these inventions might give some individuals some short-term benefits. But they’re all bad in the long term, and they certainly cannot be controlled even with twice as much wisdom as we currently have.
1. Car
The car is one of the worst inventions of modern humanity. Technically I like cars, but that’s only because they can get me away from large cities full of roads, which wouldn’t exist without mass car transportation. Cars have caused immense habitat fragmentation and the rise of suburbs, as well as being a significant source of CO2 output into the atmosphere.
2. Smartphone
The smartphone is an infective technology that has been made nearly mandatory, requiring people to spend large sums of money on them. They promote superficial connectedness amongst people and are a source of huge amounts of electronic waste. They are also a way to infect more people with more technology that they don’t need such as AI.
And of course they are controlled by large tech corporations. But even if they weren’t, they would still be one of the most damaging inventions.
3. Gunpowder
Gunpowder has vastly increased the difference in power between large organizations like the military and people. And of course, gunpowder has allowed countless genocidal regimes to be much more effective. Gunpowder and its derivative inventions such as bombs have given the system enormous control over people. Without such advanced weapons, it would be much easier to oppose tyranny with mob rule.
4. High-speed internet
Unfortunately, people have found a way to make the internet very fast. I already include the internet on a list of dubious inventions, but the speed to which we have brought it is very damaging.
Increasing the speed of the internet implies huge resource waste. The vast majority of useful things we could do on the internet can be done with very low speeds. The higher speeds are mainly meant for diversions and entertainment that we don’t really need, but that are necessary to tolerate the inhumane conditions of living in high-tech society.
5. Artificial Intelligence
AI is probably the most dangerous invention on this list. That’s not because it’s done the most damage so far, but because it has the potential to do the most damage.
AI disrupts healthy communities. But, it also is an insult to human creativity. The real danger with AI is that it is highly flexible and very powerful, and thus only contributes more power to the elite.
Open-source and distributed solutions do nothing, because training AI still requires enormous amounts of power. And those with the most money to buy the most electricity and computing components will still be vastly more powerful than any open model. And even if we somehow had much more energy to use, which is highly unlikely, we should not degrade human effort by creating AI.
6. Money
Money in its initial stages doesn’t seem so bad, because it simplifies trade. However, money has morphed into something far beyond trade: investments, which have grown to be one of the worst aspects of modern civilizations. Investments place the rich far above everyone else.
But investments are not the only problem with money. Also beyond trade is money’s ability for people to stockpile vast buying power. Before money, someone who owned a forest would not cut the whole thing down because they would have to trade it for thousands of goats or some other good that would be hard to store. So it would be much better to protect the resource and cut down a little at a time.
Not so with money. With money, you can cut the whole thing down and have the entire value of it represented as something that never expires. For its investment and storage capabilities, money has made the world significantly worse.
7. Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering is another sort of technology that is dangerous because of its powerful and unbounded scope. It allows people to be modified to better live within the unhealthy technological system. People can be crammed into smaller and smaller spaces thanks to genetic engineering that can eliminate diseases. It may sound like a good thing to eliminate diseases, but not if the long-term consequence is the ability to build hyper-dense cities.
The spirit of genetic engineering is “getting around the constraints of nature”. Without these constraints, we can further grow the human population to even more unhealthy levels.
8. Modern education
Although learning is great, as Ivan Illich pointed out, there are two types of learning: the kind that is done through natural exploration and the structured, institutional kind that defines learning objectives. The latter kind is horrible, because it forces people to go through a rigid system that is mainly meant to shape people into cogs of the system. And once they are cogs, they become merely specialized tools to generate new ideas that are good only for the system.
Modern education is almost entirely institutional, and this generally kills curiosity and usually produces either people who hate learning or who are hyper-obsessed about trivialities.
That’s not to say that there’s no place for structure. But the balance between natural curiosity and structured learning is lopsided and unhealthy. People should spend much less time in the rigid system and much more time learning creatively in more informal ways.
9. Industrial Agriculture
Industrial agriculture could be said to be the start of all of humanity’s problems. Now, instead of eating healthy foods, grocery stores are filled with highly processed wheat products and sugar. It’s a strange diet that is very far away from natural.
Moreover, industrial agriculture is responsible for the rise of huge cities. Again, at first, some agriculture wasn’t too harmful. But as techniques became more efficient, larger cities were possible and now we have an overpopulated world.
It’s even worse combined with capitalism and advanced technology, because we use all sorts of chemical and mechanical systems to disrespect the earth (e.g. using industrial fertilizer) and produce monocultures that lead to disease and bad diets as I mentioned.
10. Chemistry
A little bit of chemical knowledge isn’t a bad thing. But the sophistication of today’s chemistry is a bad thing, because it allows the synthesis of almost every sort of chemical compound, including all the artificial junk that’s put in food.
But advanced chemistry goes far beyond food. It has helped in the refinement of fossil fuels, mining, and all sorts of other resource extractions. So even if it has had some benefits as well, such as the creation of medicines, is that worth the degradation of the entire planet? Unfortunately, the two cannot be separated in today’s society, and likely they cannot be separated in any society due to human nature.
Conclusion
Not all inventions are bad. Some are not system-dependent, such as writing, fire, and hammers. All of these tools can be made locally and suit our evolutionary history. But somewhere down the line, we went terribly wrong and started pursuing invention for the sake of wealth and intellectual amusement beyond what is healthy. Unfortunately, most modern inventions are of this nature, and the ones are listed here are the worst ones I could think of. But there are many more, such as virtual reality and atomic energy.