I have to nominate the Orgasmatron. Deal me out!

Whether you're talking "Sleeper" or "Demolition Man", I prefer the old fashioned method.

Of course, if we are going to get off this rock without developing artificial gravity, we're going to need some help to keep the species growing!

Holodecks. Once inside, you'd never have an incentive to leave. Or work. Or reproduce. Or anything else.

Hand held phasers that disintegrate things. Really. It would become the perfect murder weapon - with no witnesses, and no body you've got no case.

On the other hand, I do hate taking the trash out every week. Disintegrating it would be much easier.

The spidery, virtual-reality SQUID from Strange Days. Sure, you could be right there on the stage with Susan Boyle...but you'd also be smelling that guy who's been in his mom's basement for 30 years. And I'm totally not down with the whole *surprise! death!* scenario.

My vision of dystopia has included telepathic cell phones for a while now. They'd scan the speech centers of your brain so you wouldn't have to speak up -- and they'd be able to automatically network with people who were affiliated with particular hobbies or interests in public, something like being signed up for a chatroom.

This would enable people to do things like spontaneously engage in large-scale song-and-dance routines in public. I do not want to live in a world like that. Imagine my horror when I saw this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq6b9bMBXpg

"The horror. The horror."
Got to confess, when I saw Revenge Of The Sith, all those flying cars made me spend the first half of the movie thinking about insurance.

Everybody seems to have Star Trek on the brain these days. Just before hitting this article in my RSS feed, I was at Waiter Rant (http://waiterrant.net/?p=1143), where he was commenting about how existing technology has caught up with Trek.

Brain implants/plugins, e.g. BrainPals. Very helpful, but now you're open to botnets and spam that is WAY TOO personalized (you know it would happen eventually). TMI in the cloud? No thanks.

"Honestly, I think the idea of the Spider Gorillas of Proxima Centauri ordering a seven layer burrito on their homeworld of Dor'GHLA-Hu is genuinely depressing."

That's assuming that the demand for fried qwe'kqe doesn't put Taco Bell out of business here on Earth. Cultural contamination works both ways.

Any technology featured in a David Cronenburg movie (esp videocasettes being absorbed by bodies).

the anti-matter core. Its a knife edge of works/doesn't work and when it doesn't work, well, nuking half a galaxy isn't so bad is it??

But, give me that whirry little thing the doctors use to do a pysical, if that saves cold analytical fingers going up my butt for a prostate check...I'M ALL FOR IT!

I'm totally with you on the teleportation thing. TNG proved that it is possible to make a copy, which as far as I'm concerned proves that what comes out on the other end is not really what went in at the beginning. To be fair, they also tried to paint it as some sort of quantum tunneling thing in the episode where Barclay saw space beasties during beaming, but pish and tush. McCoy was right! (Of course, they also showed that the transporter can make you immortal. You just have to replicate the accident that turned Picard, Roh and Guinan in 12 year olds. Downside, you have to go through puberty again, but hey!)

The flying cars thing is painfully obvious, too.

The anti-matter core. Its a knife edge of works/doesn't work and when it doesn't work, well, nuking half a galaxy isn't so bad is it??

But, give me that whirry little thing the doctors use to do a pysical, if that saves cold analytical fingers going up my butt for a prostate check...I'M ALL FOR IT!

Pneumatic travel tubes

Do you want to be underneath even one other person when the vacuum fails? And have you seen people trip just getting off an escalator (or ski lift)? Multiply that times 100 (or more) to get an idea of the unsuccessful landings you'll see (or have). Why did anyone think that these would be a good idea?

Quote: The minute we can turn our body maintenance over to thinking robots while we frolic, sexy and beweaponed, in a fantasy world, we're going to lose about half the people on the planet to it.

Point taken, but I kind of see that as a feature, not a bug. I've believed for years that the one thing that would surely save our planet from Malthusian overpopulation and overconsumption would be full-sensory VR pornos.

Besides, while I may not want to "check out" of the real world quite yet, I can certainly see myself doing that once I reach, say 75. In fact, once I hit the point where I'm yelling at kids to get off my lawn, I'll be happy for a sentient robot to put my brain in a tank and plug me into whatever fantasy/scifi/barbarella-world simulator you want.

The targeted ads from I, Robot using face recognition, which apparently is closer than you might think...

I think there are two kinds of examples given. For John's first two technologies, he doesn't want them because he doesn't trust them to actually work as advertised. Since they are seen to work reliably in canon, I don't think this is all that fair. If you told someone 300 years ago that we'd have half the cool stuff we have now, they'd expect them to be horribly unsafe. And some of them aren't.

The second two examples are about things that he doesn't want because, even if they work perfectly, they have bad effects on society, etc. This seems to be a more legitimate complaint.

If you don't think this will ever happen, you've obviously never played World of Warcraft...

This point was driven home by South Park, where the boys stay immersed in the game so long they become little Jabba-like blobs...

I can find a way to agree with you on flying cars that actually achieve considerable altitude, but hover crafts that must stay close to the ground could save billions of dollars and resources in road construction/repaving and tire costs.

The biggest problem I see with hovering vehicles would be inertia -- it's hard enough controlling a car with a loose suspension, how do you control one that doesn't touch the ground?

To quote Dennis Miller: "the day an unemployed iron worker can sit in his Barka-lounger and **** Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, it's going to make crack look like Sanka".

Really, if you think about it, it's amazing 2D traffic works as well as it does.

Flying cars with enforced cooperative autopilots might make some amount of sense, if they weren't too-costly energy-budget-wise.

Whatever happened to the Merlin, the hover car which was featured in Omni Magazine back in . . . mid 80s? I honestly thought we'd be gliding along on streams of air by now, stopping at the rare hovering traffic light. It's not like there would be many such lights, because of the three-dimensional roads. We didn't have the super computers of today back then, nor could I even imagine having enough money to purchase a computer. TRS 80s (Trash 80s) were really really expensive. With my one-building paper route, it would have taken me 30 years to buy one. [slap on the back] It only took me 10. We're almost there, there being the Jetsons. GPS and Navigators are already the status quo in cars nowadays. Koreans couldn't get around without one, particularly since there are no street names in this damn country. It's all . . . landmarks and oral directions, endless oral directions. You couldn't imagine how many times my Korean friends get lost. Traffic would come to a half if the communication satellites went down. That said, GPS and Navigators are just another step towards flying cars becoming an everyday reality. Infrastructure will be the problem, which is why the underdeveloped countries will more than likely be the first to have them, places like Dubai. That place already looks futuristic! Architects are being given free reign in such places, so flying cars are simply an inevitability. Infrastructure. The cars will have to fly in three-dimensional chutes, packets of air that are contained, controlled, at least from a traffic computer's perspective. Tangents, on chutes, off chutes. Maybe they'll be called slides or something, the chutes are comprised of ways, which in turn have slides connecting them to other ways in the chutes. Chutes, Ways, and Slides. The CWS Network will merge with Apple iPod, create a new line of iPods for the Network. Hell, the cars will be Apples with built-in espresso machines from Starbucks and muffins from Hasbro's Easy Bake Oven. We should call the hover cars, Simaks, after Clifford D. Simak. Beddy-bye time.

Whatever happened to the Merlin, the hover car which was featured in Omni Magazine back in . . . mid 80s? I honestly thought we'd be gliding along on streams of air by now, stopping at the rare hovering traffic light. It's not like there would be many such lights, because of the three-dimensional roads. We didn't have the super computers of today back then, nor could I even imagine having enough money to purchase a computer. TRS 80s (Trash 80s) were really really expensive. With my one-building paper route, it would have taken me 30 years to buy one. [slap on the back] It only took me 10. We're almost there, there being the Jetsons. GPS and Navigators are already the status quo in cars nowadays. Koreans couldn't get around without one, particularly since there are no street names in this damn country. It's all . . . landmarks and oral directions, endless oral directions. You couldn't imagine how many times my Korean friends get lost. Traffic would come to a half if the communication satellites went down. That said, GPS and Navigators are just another step towards flying cars becoming an everyday reality. Infrastructure will be the problem, which is why the underdeveloped countries will more than likely be the first to have them, places like Dubai. That place already looks futuristic! Architects are being given free reign in such places, so flying cars are simply an inevitability. Infrastructure. The cars will have to fly in three-dimensional chutes, packets of air that are contained, controlled, at least from a traffic computer's perspective. Tangents, on chutes, off chutes. Maybe they'll be called slides or something, the chutes are comprised of ways, which in turn have slides connecting them to other ways in the chutes. Chutes, Ways, and Slides. The CWS Network will merge with Apple iPod, create a new line of iPods for the Network. Hell, the cars will be Apples with built-in espresso machines from Starbucks and muffins from Hasbro's Easy Bake Oven. We should call the hover cars, Simaks, after Clifford D. Simak. Beddy-bye time.

As I read this I am sitting in an ANSI SDO (American National Standards Institute accredited Standards Development Organization) discussing cars that don't crash.

Of course the fact that the guy who is speaking is from GM doesn't give me a lot of hope. He is also talking about further use of cell phones in automobiles.

The transporter was just there so they wouldn't have to film a bunch of expensive shuttle sequences.

We already had pneumatic tubes that carried human traffic, back in the 1800's.

I wouldn't mind something like Wonkavision, which was essentially the Star Trek transporter. I'd only want to use it to make chocolate bars big, though. Not to make people small.

Except my enemies. You know who you are.

Interesting points, but it's hard to believe Scalzi is serious about some of them. Teleportation? as long as it was as safe as flying NO ONE, including John, would ever set foot in an airplane again (ok, excluding a tiny percentage who have a real phobia about it, just like some have about flying, such as Ray Bradbury, apparently). The real problem with teleportation as in transporters is the incredible security problems.
(apparently no one noticed that the interstellar transporters in Star Trek just made starships obsolete; a good thing if I believed it would actually stop more terrible movies from being made). Same thing goes for flying cars, though John actually UNDERESTIMATES the potential for disaster there. Doesn't matter, make them robotic and as safe or safer than driving, and everyone, save the phobic, would be doing it. Thinking robots? Plugging into virtual reality? I agree there, but the problem is these things are gonna happen, nothing we can do about it and half the human race IS gonna tune out, permanently (it's apparently ALREADY happened multiple times to male adolescents in Japan). No FTL, them is fighting words!
Ok, it almost certainly IS impossible, but no one would turn it down. Science fiction has been written without it, some of it even good (but not the 30 year old novel most of you are thinking about!).

Definitely the Tricorder.

Being able to be reached by my co-workers no matter where on the planet I am would be—

Oh wait....

Cloning. Having more than one Rush Limbaugh would be a bad thing. Even having the ability to live a long time through transplanting your brain in a clone would be a bad thing since only the wealthy would get the benefit. This would set up a scenario where the wealthy would continue to get more and more of the worlds resources and the rest of us would sink lower and lower.

Cloning. Having more than one Rush Limbaugh would be a bad thing. Even having the ability to live a long time through transplanting your brain in a clone would be a bad thing since only the wealthy would get the benefit. This would set up a scenario where the wealthy would continue to get more and more of the worlds resources and the rest of us would sink lower and lower.

Yep, cloning is a bad idea, especially if you let them comment in public before the deltas have had time to diverge.

I don't trust the transporters and only Star Trek and Galaxy Quest could get away with using them. (And sometimes it appears inside out. Then explodes.)

The one piece of no-thanks tech that's already here is Twitter. Seriously, except for news feeds, why? Would Captain Kirk (old or new) Twitter? Would Obi-wan Kenobi Twitter? Would the Cylons? I think not.

And get off my lawn!

{ha ha}

Everybody's worried about transporters copying them wrong or turning them inside out or something, but no one seems to be worried about being divided into good and evil halves, fusing together into a combined personality with some really annoying dude and turning into a one-man cop-buddy film, or getting zapped into an alternate universe where people carry agonizers and do the Hitler salute, etc etc etc. Transporters suck.

The worst thing about them, Trek only rarely addressed: it's a really nasty way to deliver a weapon of mass destruction.

The second worst thing about them, nobody in Trek ever seems to thought about at all: Geography ceases to be a factor in any decision whatsoever. All those beautiful places in the world that are still unspoiled because they're hard to get to? Packed like Disneyland. Mt. Everest ends up covered with t-shirt shops. Anyone in Kansas who wants to go to the beach today goes to the beach today, so those are gonna be pretty damn crowded. That concert you' were hoping to get good seats for is mobbed by fans from everywhere on Earth. Every place with lax zoning regulations gets paved and turned into a bland suburban bedroom community and/or office park for everywhere else on Earth, and you end up living in Chad and commuting to work in Djakarta, most likely without even being aware of where either place is.

Fembots.
Sure it all sounds good on the surface, but if you think a woman scorned is bad, just waiting until she has a positronic brain and the strength of 10 to plot her revenge.

One thing we have that needs to work better...Spell and grammar check (see my previous post).

Or maybe I could just proof read?

Nah!