Tech Leaders Would Un-Invent Nuclear Weapons and Selfie Sticks

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.

Silicon Valley celebrates and rewards innovation (or so it brags). Industry leaders often speak winsomely of disruption, progress, and human invention.

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.

Some respondents thought of communication technologies they use or see every day. Two would dismiss 24-hour cable news. Three said that email should be abolished. Five called for Facebook’s destruction or the reduction of social media more generally. Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, would get rid of the telephone (but not the smartphones that followed).

Aaron Patzer, the CEO of Fountain.com, wanted to de-invent “the Newsfeed” as a concept. “The front page of every (popular) site on the Internet today is the same: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora. They are endless scrolls of trivialities and shared links. These sites have simply become the newspapers—albeit customized by our interests and friends—of yesteryear,” he writes.

Others looked more to innovations that eroded human health. Individuals voted to scrap cigarettes and heroin. Jillian York, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wants to annul “genetic testing for the masses.”

Jeremy Howard, CEO of the health-care company Enlitic, took a more targeted approach. “Leaded petrol,” he said. “It killed 5,000 people a year in the U.S.A., and it led to 2 million children a year having toxic levels of lead in their blood. And yet the dangers of the substance were known about and discussed back in 1922, before it was first added to gasoline.”

Now we get to the two “winning” categories.

About a quarter of respondents decried seemingly small-minded gizmos—the so-called “selfie stick” category, which more than 10 percent of respondents would specifically prefer to see eliminated forever. One respondent targeted the Shake Weight. Another went after Segways. Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America, said the Salad Shooter should go away. Her response seemed to cover the whole bracket: “The world is full of products no one really needs.”

The other largest category was technology of war. Specifically, nuclear weapons, which more than 10 percent of respondents would also un-invent.

Tim Wilson, a managing partner at Artiman Ventures, would de-invent chemical weapons as well, in addition to human knowledge of nuclear fusion and fission. “All came from extensive research into the periodic table. If we missed some rows/columns we may be better off,” he wrote.

Other panelists went after similarly world-historic technologies. Two respondents would retract gunpowder. (Which is a more risky move, given the role guns played in 18th and 19th-century democratic revolutions.) Two more wanted to get rid of drones. And Kate Crawford, an academic at Microsoft Research, went after a specific tool with some history behind it.

“It's a tough choice, but the land mine would be in my top ten,” she said. It’s “a fully autonomous weapon that’s been around since 1277, still killing indiscriminately around the world. But it’s far less sexy to talk about than killer robots.”

About the Author

Robinson Meyer is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers technology.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”