What tech would you un-invent?

> The internet, Computer mouse, Physical media -- what's the point of including these? If someone doesn't like them, they can simply not buy or use them. They don't bother you unless you actively seek them out.

I guess YOUR door has not been hammered with computer mouse. Well, that has actually happened to me, but I still do like these. But your argument is still false. Even if you don't use the internet, people can tell lies about you in there. But then again, that goes more to the social media.

> Social media -- same point as above. However I suppose if other people keep hounding you to join Facebook, it can get annoying.

Facebook is a real pain, because a lot of companies are starting to put their stuff there, which I can not then see, because I don't want to be part of Facebook and they require login.

> Cell phones

These save a lot of lives.

> Nuclear bombs -- obviously yes, no explanation needed.

Nuclear bombs save a lot of lives by preventing wars. And even if they didn't, the amount of people killed by nuclear bombs is very little compared e.g. to people killed by passive smoking.

Yes. Ubiquitous video cameras turn into a surveillance society. See Trapwire.

You're not a very good Spy Handler if you can't see that.

"I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country". - George S. Patton

Like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, .. all places where a few dollars will kit you out with a Kalashnikov.

Police forces made safe civil societies, not vigilantes.

Oh, you're a lunatic, so this is wasted on you...

Hear hear, my friend! There was never a single war [wikipedia.org] in Europe before the invention of paper currency. The Romans, in particular, were an eminently peaceful people!

The Roman emperors would never have done such a thing. (Except when it was convenient.)

The EU never started any war (although we participated in some because we are the US's lap dog). Germany was not part of the EU when WWII started because there was no EU back then. The EU works really well against wars. Even if we wanted to start one we would first bicker about who delivers what and how much it would cost the respective members for about twenty years, and after that there would be no reason to start the war anymore. Unfortunately, that is the reason Clinton intervened in the Balkan in the 1990s: because we were too busy bickering to solve this European problem.

My understanding is that a need for gold (to use as currency) was a major reason for the Roman invasions first of Gaul (recent finds show pre-Roman Celts had significant gold-mining operations) and then of Dacia (now Romania). We can say with more certainty that gold was a major motive of the Spanish conquest of the New World.

The mechanism by which commodity-backed currencies motivate wars looks pretty straightforward: If your economy grinds to a screeching halt and you want to do "quantitative easing," you need to physically go out and grab more of the commodity. Fiat currencies avoid at least this issue -- and your argument about them being useful for funding wars seems to apply just as well to funding any other activity.

(It's also worth noting that, if you do have a gold or a gold-backed currency, and you do succeed in grabbing a bunch of coin from your neighbors, then, despite being commodity-backed, you will still have inflation. Apparently this is what happened in the Spanish empire as a result of all that New World gold.)

Wish I had mod points at the moment. Far too many people assign the bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki special moral significance, as if it's worse for a lot of people to be killed by one very powerful bomb instead of lots of smaller ones. The earlier bombing of Tokyo caused more deaths than either atomic bomb, and was every bit as horrific. Beyond that, there are some things to note that people often overlook:

First, a big part of the reason why large-scale civilian deaths like this are abhorrent to us now is that we have embraced the idea that we can be "at war with the government of country X but not the people of country X." This is mostly a post-WW2 thing, and in fact is partly a reaction to the things that happened then. At the time, if you were at war with country X, that applied to everyone living there. It was still viewed as wrong to kill civilians just for kicks, but if civilians were killed in the process of destroying an enemy's warmaking ability, that was to be expected. Today the very concept of an "enemy civilian" is almost an oxymoron. Back then, it was not.

Second, there were a lot of innocent people at the mercy of the Japanese. Forget the deaths that an Allied invasion force would have suffered, if you like. There were still many thousands of prisoners of war and slave laborers (such as the "comfort women" from Korea) within Japan and in Japanese-occupied territory, being held and worked under terrible conditions. (It's telling that for Allied war prisoners, you had better survival odds under the Nazis than under the Imperial Japanese). The worse the war went for Japan, the worse these people were treated, and in the event of an invasion they would have likely have been massacred, as was done elsewhere. If the Allies had merely blockaded Japan without invading, the prisoners/slaves would have starved to death, along with thousands of Japanese -- it was only due to food relief carried out during the occupation that Japan escape devastating famine in 1946.

Third, the Japanese were quite intent on fighting on. The government was willing -- expected -- to sacrifice millions of civilians in order to increase Allied invasion casualties and thus get better peace terms. Even with the atomic bombings, it was a near thing, with Japanese officers attempting to capture Emperor Hirohito to prevent the surrender. (Some folks cite the USSR's entry into the war as the decisive factor, but while the Soviet army was huge and powerful, that wouldn't have mattered if they couldn't get to Japan. The Soviets had very little sealift at the time, and their paratroops were mostly used as regular infantry).

I don't deny that the civilians of Hiroshima & Nagasaki were mostly innocent, but sometimes the choice is not whether innocent people will die, but which ones will. Yes, that's horrible. I would never want to be in the position of having to decide that kind of question. But that was the question at the time: the people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, vs. the millions of Japanese and nearly a million Allied soldiers who would die in an invasion or thousands of Japanese who would die in famine, plus the thousands of Korean and Chinese slaves and Allied prisoners who would die in either scenario.

Nuclear weapons make war into an all or nothing affair.

Right now, they seem great, for the reasons you gave. War has become less common and less brutal. Of course, that reasoning smacks of post hoc ergo propter hoc. I'd suggest that the UN, globalized industry, globalized culture, and improved communication all contribute more to the current world peace than threat of nuclear holocaust does.

And when nukes do get used, it will make war far worse. Human civilization only exists today thanks to a stroke of luck. We got lucky when we survived the Cold War. It's easy to look back now and say "Of course things turned out this way! Things couldn't have happened differently!" But that's just a comforting illusion. It was luck. And we won't stay lucky forever.

Nukes will proliferate. More and more dictatorships will obtain them. Eventually nukes will be used. Maybe it'll be by some religious whackjob who honestly, fervently believes that god wants him to destroy the infidels. Or some non-religious nihilist, who honestly believes that human life is of no particular importance and simply doesn't care how many people he kills to reach his goals. Or some desperate despot, staring down angry throngs of rebels, and making the purely rational decision that the ICC will show him more mercy than the crowds. But it will happen. Humanity's been around for fifty thousand years, give or take, and barring unforeseen circumstances has quite a few millenia to go. The fact that we haven't used a nuke in 60 years is hardly convincing evidence that we never will.

We'd be better off if the laws of physics made nuclear technology impossible.