12 Inventions Sci-Fi Warned Us About - And Then Real Scientists Just Invented Them Anyway

Government surveillance and control are staples of science fiction, and one of the most invasive forms is social credit systems. In Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone’s character wakes up after decades in a cryogenic chamber to find a completely different Los Angeles to the one he’d left. Crime is practically non-existent, people talk to computers, and Taco Bell is a delicacy. But there is also a strictly implemented moral code that bans swearing, meat, contact sports, non-educational toys, and spicy food. People who violate the rules are fined and docked points on their social credit. A more dramatic and chillingly realistic portrayal of a social credit system can be found in the “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror, in which a person’s social standing and economic status are determined by a ratings system. Each interaction, from purchasing coffee to chatting with an acquaintance, leads to a rating from zero to five stars. People with a high cumulative score get discounts on mortgages and invitations to events, while people with low scores are social outcasts. It’s a dystopian and eerily believable scenario for the near future, but in one part of the world, it already exists. 

Since 2014, the Chinese government has been rolling out a “social credit system” whereby individuals, companies, and government entities have a rating. In 2022, a draft law was released that would make the system mandatory, with consequences for those whose ratings dip below a certain threshold. The purpose, according to the Chinese government, is to enhance trust within society. People and companies are rated based on their levels of perceived “trustworthiness” in contexts as widespread as business dealings and familial relations. Activities that boost a person’s score include acts of heroism, good financial credit, taking care of elderly relatives, and praising the government online. Activities that lower a person’s score include “insincere” apologies, cheating in online games, not visiting relatives, criticizing the government, and committing traffic violations. Rewards for high scores include free gym memberships and skipping hospital waiting lists, while punishments include bans from airlines, revocation of public services, and public shaming. The public shaming component could consist of publicly located screens that show the faces and ID numbers of low-ranking individuals. The system has received widespread outcry from foreign governments, but given the fact that many people already use ratings to determine which movies to watch, where to have dinner, and which accountant to hire, the condemnation looks increasingly hypocritical. 

Tech bros aren’t the most beloved members of society, but the creator of Oculus Rift drew larger-than-usual pushback for his jaw-dropping proposal for the next phase of virtual reality headsets. You might remember that line in The Matrix when Morpheus tells Neo that if a person dies in the Matrix, they die in the real world. It’s a moment where the audience grasps the significance of Neo’s decision to take the red pill, establishes the rules of the world within the film, and raises the stakes of the narrative. It’s a revelatory moment in a thrilling sci-fi action movie, but it’s not exactly aspirational. Most people aren’t flocking to VR in the hopes that it will kill them in real life. But this was precisely the goal of Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who announced in 2022 that he had created a VR headset that would kill people in the real world if they died in a video game.

Based on a fictional headset in the anime series Sword Art Online, Luckey’s so-called NerveGear headset contains an explosive device that would kill the user as soon as they died in a video game. “When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed,” he explained, “the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user.” He said that he has always been fascinated by tying a person’s real life with their in-game avatar because it “instantly raise[s] the stakes to the maximum level and force[s] people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.” He added that “the good news” was that he was halfway to making NerveGear a reality, but “the bad news” was that the only aspect he’d figured out was the lethal explosive device. The invention included an “anti-tampering mechanism” that prevents the user from removing the headset if they want to back out of, you know, having their head blown up. “It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user,” he said. “It won’t be the last.” Whatever reality he’s living in, Palmer does not seem to have inspired other entrepreneurs with this one.

Since the early days of cinema, filmmakers have explored the convergence of technology and the labor force, imagining dystopias in which human workers are exploited, controlled, and cast aside by machines. In the 1927 classic Metropolis, factory workers are literally eaten alive by the monstrous machine they operate. In 2008’s Sleep Dealer, South American immigrants are kept on the Mexican side of the border and hooked up to a cybernetic network that allows them to control the movements of robots in the US, a technology that exploits their labor while preventing them from crossing into the country. The series Severance depicts employees of a mysterious company whose brains are separated via a surgical implant into distinct consciousnesses - a work self and a home self. The company coerces, abuses, and imprisons the workers, ensuring that they glean every ounce of productivity from them without protest. 

The labor force in the real world has always transformed alongside technological innovation, but robots replacing workers on an assembly line is nowhere near as ominous as the technology portrayed in science fiction that physically controls the bodies and minds of human workers. You’d think these innovations would be left to dystopian thrillers, but it was only a matter of time before a company decided to try them out. In 2018, Amazon secured two patents for wristbands that would monitor its workers’ movements and correct them via a warning vibration. Employees had already accused the company of inhuman labor conditions, asserting that they were pushed to exhaustion by unrealistic targets. One employee told the New York Times that he and his colleagues were treated like machines, saying, “The robotic technology isn’t up to scratch yet, so until it is, they will use human robots.”

Amazon’s workplace surveillance led to a widespread movement among its warehouse workers to unionize. In response, the company reportedly made plans to release an internal chat app that would ban words such as “slave labor,” “union,” “pay raise,” and “plantation.” These inventions may not be eating employees alive like the machine in Metropolis, but they give any cinematic dystopian workplace a run for its money.

Snowpiercer is centered around the premise that scientists’ attempts to cool the sun and curb climate change inadvertently caused another ice age. Set on a train barreling through an icy tundra, the movie follows the handful of people who escaped the frozen planet and now circumnavigate the globe. They have reverted to a medieval hierarchy in which the lower classes live in squalor and the upper classes live in luxury. Children are enslaved, the poorest members of the train are regularly culled, and there are no solutions for getting off the train and starting a new life. It’s a terrifying portrait of a well-intentioned scientific “solution” gone wrong, and yet, scientists are working rapidly to replicate the exact same experiment that caused near-extinction in the movie, believing it might be the only way to solve the climate crisis. 

Faced with the imminent and dire consequences of a rapidly warming planet, scientists are exploring the possibility of blocking the sun with airborne chemicals such as sulfur, aluminum, and diamond dust, to bring the global temperature back to manageable levels. Stratospheric aerosol injection (also called “solar geoengineering” and “solar-radiation management”) is being seriously studied by multiple organizations, and scientists insist it is only a matter of time before it's implemented. Creating another ice age isn’t at the top of their critics’ list of concerns, but they do warn of other consequences. Dimming the sun could make it harder for plants to grow, and cause frigid temperatures in places that are already cold. Flooding could increase in some areas, while other areas could experience aggravated droughts. The result, scientists say, could be nothing less than nuclear annihilation if one country is on the losing side of another country’s decision to launch a solar geoengineering program. These all-too-real considerations are more complex than the world-killing ice age in Snowpiercer, but no less dire.

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report revolves around a futuristic arm of law enforcement called Pre-Crime, in which mediums - known as “precogs” - predict and therefore prevent future crimes. Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, the commanding officer of the program who begins to have doubts about its accuracy when he is accused of a future murder. Even though the city has rid itself of crime through the precogs’ clairvoyance, the movie raises questions not only about free will, but also about the people who run the technology. In the world of Minority Report, the leaders of the Pre-Crime program hide discrepancies (also known as minority reports) in the precogs’ predictions, but also bury their own murderous crimes and frame their enemies. In the real world, where criminals are said to be innocent until proven guilty, predicting crime would seem relegated to dystopian fiction, but it exists, and it’s only becoming more popular among authorities. 

In 2022, researchers from the University of Chicago claimed to have developed an algorithm that accurately predicted crimes 90 percent of the time. Their model forecasts areas where crime might occur rather than who might be perpetrating them, but it still raises red flags for some researchers. Predictive policing algorithms are based on police data which is shaped by police activity, and police activity skews disproportionately toward minority and low-income communities. A pre-crime program in Los Angeles was scrapped in 2019 for this reason. In Florida, however, pre-crime programs are in full swing, with law enforcement maintaining lists of people who they decide are likely to commit a crime. Some of their predictions are based on previous arrests, but others are based on children’s grades, histories of abuse, and school attendance records.

"Someone should tell the Tampa police that Minority Report was a *dystopian* society,” a reporter quipped on Twitter, “Not, like a prescriptive idea of how we should actually fight crime.”

Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi classic RoboCop imagines a near-future in which a private corporation called Omni Consumer Products takes over the police force in Detroit and creates cyborg officers. The first iteration of their robots murders a member of the company. The second iteration is more successful. Created from the body of Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), a murdered cop, RoboCop is lethal and loyal, efficiently dispensing with criminals and adhering to his bosses’ orders. When he learns that he used to be a human cop, however, he starts asking questions and discovers that Omni is responsible for Murphy’s murder. When he tries to apprehend the executive responsible, he finds that his programming prevents him from arresting a member of the corporation, even when that person is a criminal.

You don’t need a dystopian movie to tell you that cyborg cops are a bad idea, especially when they’re given the power to use deadly force. This was not, however, a deterrent for the city of Dallas, which dispatched a robot in 2016 to kill a sniper who had murdered several police officers. US law enforcement has used robots to save people from burning buildings and dismantle bombs for years, but this was the first known instance of a robot being configured to use deadly force. In 2022, San Francisco was poised to introduce its own fleet of lethal cyborgs but backed out at the last minute after a public outcry. One of the signs wielded by protesters read, “We all saw that movie… No Killer Robots.” The backlash wasn’t about the possibility of robot malfunctions or the inherent lack of humanity of AI, but about the fallibility of the people who invent and deploy the technology, specifically the police’s history of killing Black and Hispanic people at disproportionately high rates. RoboCop provides a similar illustration of the risks, in which the company behind the cyborg is the villain, not the cyborg itself. The initiative may have failed in San Francisco, but militaries across the world continue to develop killer robot technology at breakneck speed.