What you have just said is that you are only happy when you are doing what someone else has told you to do. I can’t agree that the undoubted good of a replicator as seen in Star Trek® should be dispensed with because you can’t take responsibility for your life.
X ray glasses. Oh, yeah, they LOOK like fun. Undress all the women you see with them, all unknown to them. But sooner or later, you’re going to want to get REALLY intrusive and look beneath their skins, and THEN you’ll realize that no matter how attractive an exterior a woman may have, all of them are full of disgusting lumpy organs bathed in goo (just like men). THAT’LL put a damper on things.
They’re the major plot elements in the “Gil the ARM” stories, of which Niven wrote three IIRC. Also “The Jigsaw Man”, which charts the course of a condemned criminal trying to escape consignment to the organ tanks on a charge of red light violation. See, once society has the chance of living forever on the back of condemned criminals’ organs, there’s going to be a lot of condemned criminals, on whatever crimes can be put on the books.
Scott Adams observed that if these existed people would sneak up behind you and seal up your ass.
Ice-9. But that’s kind of cheating, since the whole point of Ice-9 is that it was a terrible idea to make it in the first place.
Niven mentions wireheading in some of his ‘known space’ universe short stories and it features prominently in the Ringworld series, because The main character, Louis Wu, is a reformed wirehead; the mental fortitude he gained by his triumph over this seemingly inescapable addiction allowed him to resist the lure of the PAK root, as well as generally instilling him with stoicism
Who wrote the old, old, short, short story where food pills had replaced food, and the whole family was gathered around a table (why?) for the Thanksgiving division of the pill, which was a Wonka-esque gimmick that would give each family member the sensual experience and nutrition of a lavish feast.
As dad gets ready to “carve” the pill with a razor, he slips up and the pill rolls down the table to the infant, who grabs it and swallows it whole. The entire family looks on in horror as the baby looks momentarily pleased and then explodes.
I remember a teacher reading that to the glass in grade three or four. Made quite an impression.
“jacking” into a computer network by using direct neural contact (a UPS port in your head! 2.0 even!) There isn’t a firewall that could be created to make it safe enough. The idea of your brain on Windows Thetan… brrrrr.
You think Star Trek Replicators are bad, wait till you see the ones from Stargate SG-1.
I always thought the good old Star Trek transporter was one of those “good idea, but bad in practice” things. Think about it. Every season of every show seems to have at least one episode where the transporter goes haywire and creates an evil duplicate, or de-ages someone, or plunks them into an alternate reality.
Think about this, if it is that comon for thais kind of weirdness to happen on the ships we are seeing, (usally the "best in the fleet") how often does this stuff happen in the rest of starfleet? This is supposed to be established, everyday tech, but if these sort of mishaps are as comon as we see on the show, why isn't the Federation overrun with the nightmarish results of transporter malfunctions?Because you sure as hell wouldn’t be needing it anymore… unless you’re a “righty”
Oh, but a lot of the time the weirdness happens because they’re the first ship off exploring some strange bit of technobabble, so a lot of the ships that are just on routine supply runs or whatever would have significantly less chance of running into them. 
I predict that this technology will eventually be combined with motion capture such that you can project a different face on the other party’s screen. You’ll be in front of your video pickup; your computer will read the position of your eyes, mouth, eyebrows, etc., and map this onto a 3D model of a head and face. When you answer your call, the other party will see you as a gorilla, or Homer Simpson, or Julius Caesar (Civ III version). You’ll show your actual face only to friends and family, people you know and trust; everybody else gets Jar-Jar Binks.
Today we download ring tones; tomorrow we’ll download phoneheads.
Little known fact - the first published work to popularize the word “robot” dealt with that very scenario.
I think ST transporters were so weirdness-prone because the writers used them as plot devices. If the technology were possible in the real world (which I seriously doubt), I don’t believe Kirk-type weirdness would happen with any regularity, simply because we’d wise up and not use the transporter as much till the kinks were out.
I recall an issue of the Avengers from the late 80s-early 90s in which the team got a message in the middle of the night; the Wasp, then team leader, flew straight from her bedroom to answer the video-phone. When Hercules (or possibly the Black Knight) pointed out that she was in her nightie, she shrugged it off, saying that the phone was programmed to always show them as being in costume no matter what they were actually wearing.
We won’t see video-phones in wide use till we can do THAT.
Already being worked on, actually.
Ooo, I thought of another tech we would do better without: full voice-recognition for computers.
a) emails and message board posts would become even more insulting, with more flames, until nuance recognition became available — and the problem would now extend to business letters, official government correspondence, and so on
b) spying and wiretapping would become automated
c) everybody and his brother would suddenly have to dictate the Great Um, American Book Thingy, and the publishing market would be flooded with evidence of why those people weren’t writing before
What’s a Shrike?
Whoops. That last post should have been in response to :
cf. “With Folded Hands”, by Jack Williamson.