Imagine a world where one invention changes society

[Darth Wong]

I was just thinking about this: so much sci-fi nowadays is based on such monotonous convention. A lot of sci-fi used to revolve around the idea of asking what society would be like if you changed one particular thing. It doesn't even have to be scientifically feasible; the point was more to ask what effect it would have on society than to make up some technobabble bullshit to explain how it works (and worse yet, extrapolate that technobabble into new devices which solve even more problems).

For example: imagine what society would be like if someone invented a cheap, 100% accurate handheld lie detector device. Just point it at somebody and you can get a true/false reading on anything he says.

Think it through and think about how it might change everyday interactions such as financial transactions, dating, marital infidelity, legal issues, police work, job interviews, international diplomacy, etc. It would actually be a startlingly different world, wouldn't it? The Twilight Zone used to explore this sort of "what if" sci-fi, way back before all sci-fi became "action movies set in the future".

[Alyeska]

Oh geeze, that certainly would change life. Everyone lies, the question is the context and whether or not they know they are lying or merely remembering wrong.

[Hawkwings]

well, if you believe you're remembering right, it wouldn't be a lie.

My question would be, how small and discreet could you make this device? If it was small and discreet enough, well, I think people would be a lot nicer to each other. Over several generations, perhaps lying would become so taboo that it doesn't happen...

Or not, knowing human nature...

[Alyeska]

Ah, but a truly effective lie detector would read your memory and could potentialy spot the real memory.

[Deathstalker]

You can forget about the white lies that help society function.

"Honey, does this dress make me look fat?"

or

"No honey, size doesn't matter."

Politicians would be out of a job and crime would still happen, just be sure if you do something illegal, don't get caught! I could see an increase in the use of the death penalty, with a 100% lie detector it eliminates the doubt that someone might be innocent.

I'm sure someone would invent a counter to the device about five minutes after the lie detector device is invented.

[Nephtys]

I can see such a device being a part of one of those dystopian future settings, like Equilibrium, or Harrison deBergerac or something. It adds a social layer of control over people by making lies obvious and '100 percent discernable', leading to people with control of this sort of device a ruling class, simply by being able to frame others with no doubts. Like Minority Report, but with minor things such as catching lies in the act.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Well i imagine it would, being 100% accurate, tell you if it's an out and out lie or just a false memory. God wouldnt it be fun to make every elected official speak through one of those things? They'd be scared to lie and get caught on live TV, they'd all have to be honest or else look like assholes and be humiliated.

You know i saw this thing where they said, someday they could put cameras in our eyes and record our entire lives for posterity. So when someone dies you have a tape where you can see their whole life over again, from a first-person,obviously compressed for time at your leasure. I've often wondered if everyone was obligated to get one of these recorders, how it would effect us, our view of life and death. I imagine some people would be shocked at seeing what their family members did.

[Falkenhayn]

An engine that allows you to travel anywhere in the world, and a drug in the water supply that randomly determines the ethnicity of a child regardless of parentage.

[Montcalm]

There wouldn't be a need for costly trial,*I'm innocent your honor* BEEP BEEP BEEP the lie detector says bullshit.

[SirNitram]

Larry Niven did some great work with this concept; he made a world where a simple teleporter was invented. Cheap, accurate.. You still have problems with CoE(Teleporting downhill in old booths left you soaking with sweat, as they didn't store the excess energy to toss the next passengers 'uphill'.), but it changed the world. Several crime stories were done in this, because of how it changed relationships, even how crimes are committed..

It's really an amazing branch of sci-fi. But it takes real creativity, not the half-assed 'I'll draw some shiny shit' stuff passed off as such.

[Falkenhayn]

I can see such a device being a part of one of those dystopian future settings, like Equilibrium, or Harrison deBergerac or something. It adds a social layer of control over people by making lies obvious and '100 percent discernable', leading to people with control of this sort of device a ruling class, simply by being able to frame others with no doubts. Like Minority Report, but with minor things such as catching lies in the act.

Nitpick:

Harrison Bergeron, in no way related to Cerrano de Begerac.

[18-Till-I-Die]

You could also turn it around and make it very dark and creepy, like a horror story.

Like in this Gattaca like future world, people can geneticaly enhance their babies before they're born...but with the side effect that one in every 10,000 is born a hideous mutant 'vampire' like creature (think the little monster from It's Alive).

Now...would you roll the dice with YOUR kid's genes? Would you take the chance? One in ten thousand...personally, i wouldnt go for them odds, but...some would.

[Junghalli]

I'm sure someone would invent a counter to the device about five minutes after the lie detector device is invented.

Which will lead somebody else to modify the device against the countermeasure, which will lead somebody else to invent another countermeasure, thus beginning a technology race between ever better lie detectors and ever more clever countermeasures. Wee, what fun! Hell, it may even be possible to circumvent the device through doublethink, without even a technological countermeasure.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Well...it need not be scientifically feasable. '100% accurate' could translate into literally, perfect. Like it has some super quantum computer that always makes the right reading no matter what countermeasures you try. Or not, but it's an idea.

[Nephtys]

I can see such a device being a part of one of those dystopian future settings, like Equilibrium, or Harrison deBergerac or something. It adds a social layer of control over people by making lies obvious and '100 percent discernable', leading to people with control of this sort of device a ruling class, simply by being able to frame others with no doubts. Like Minority Report, but with minor things such as catching lies in the act.

Nitpick:

Harrison Bergeron, in no way related to Cerrano de Begerac.

Ah, yes. My brain just short circuited. Thanks.

[Nephtys]

You could also turn it around and make it very dark and creepy, like a horror story.

Like in this Gattaca like future world, people can geneticaly enhance their babies before they're born...but with the side effect that one in every 10,000 is born a hideous mutant 'vampire' like creature (think the little monster from It's Alive).

Now...would you roll the dice with YOUR kid's genes? Would you take the chance? One in ten thousand...personally, i wouldnt go for them odds, but...some would.

Of course that'd be worth it. For that 1/10,000 chance of horror, you're solving a 1/1000 chance of less dramatic horror. Horrible birth defects, genetic disorders... gone. It's a matter of one having better numbers.

[Stormbringer]

I was just thinking about this: so much sci-fi nowadays is based on such monotonous convention. A lot of sci-fi used to revolve around the idea of asking what society would be like if you changed one particular thing. It doesn't even have to be scientifically feasible; the point was more to ask what effect it would have on society than to make up some technobabble bullshit to explain how it works (and worse yet, extrapolate that technobabble into new devices which solve even more problems).

And a lot of that old science fiction tended to be remarkably shitty as well. I've doven into some old short story collections from the library, they're good in about the same ratio as today. If you don't believe me, comb through a public library. The winnowing process and selective memory tends to have a remarkable effect on percieved quality.

Heck, look at the works of some of the classic authors that still survive like Clarke. The Trigger is one such "What if..." story and it's half political screed, half steaming load.

Now the visual medias have generally declined somewhat but not all that much. There was still a remarkable load of crap out there. Part of it is the emphasis on quantity over quality, part is just winnowing.

[Patrick Degan]

Larry Niven did some great work with this concept; he made a world where a simple teleporter was invented. Cheap, accurate.. You still have problems with CoE(Teleporting downhill in old booths left you soaking with sweat, as they didn't store the excess energy to toss the next passengers 'uphill'.), but it changed the world. Several crime stories were done in this, because of how it changed relationships, even how crimes are committed..

It's really an amazing branch of sci-fi. But it takes real creativity, not the half-assed 'I'll draw some shiny shit' stuff passed off as such.

Another story he did was the discovery of sideways-time travel, or travel to parallel alternate universes. Led to a commercial boom and a thriving tourist industry but also ended up triggering off a wave of seemingly purposless suicides, rapes, and murders because the knowledge that everyone makes a decision in every possible way the outcome could break in multiple universes causes an increasing number of people to take a "what the hell" attitude and abandon all restraint or sense of responsibility —so much so that it's beginning to reach crisis proportions. Story ends with the police detective protagonist hovering on the edge of suicide himself as he contemplates all the different possible outcomes stemming either from the decision to put the gun away or to put it to his head. Can't recall the title, but it was in the All The Myriad Ways collection.

[Zor]

An Cybernetic Implant that links up to moter control, vision and thought parts of the brain that is manditory. If someone points a gun at someone, or holds a knife to someones neck or is about to beat someone, or tries to steal something, the implant takes over, stops him/her from doing it and walks his ass down to a jail cell to serve his term.

Zor

[dworkin]

The 100% lie detector idea is a cool one. Cheap and handheld?

What would you do? What would other people do? I can see fundies using it to prove they are speaking the 'unvarnished gospel truth' or using it to sell creationism.

Who would be the first to invent a device which could subvert it? How would that be used? Could you alter yourself metabolically somehow to give a false negative? Induced brainwashing/hypnotism so that your stoolie 'believed' they were telling the truth.

It wouldn't eradicate dishonesty, just demand greater skill in 'lying'.

[Jawawithagun]

An Cybernetic Implant that links up to moter control, vision and thought parts of the brain that is manditory. If someone points a gun at someone, or holds a knife to someones neck or is about to beat someone, or tries to steal something, the implant takes over, stops him/her from doing it and walks his ass down to a jail cell to serve his term.

Zor

First people start getting inventive in ways to indirectly kill people.
Then someone manages to hack the thing and the first implant-controlled zombie assassins hit the road.
Finally someone else leaks the military override for those implants and everything is as it was before.

[Peregrin Toker]

My original fic The Wormhole War actually depicts a society where one of those "society-changing inventions" Mike speaks of has become commonplace centuries ago to the point of being taken for granted, though it's not a major plot point. Thing is that the Xril (a civilization descended from humans who colonized a low-gravity world) have adopted as their primary form of communication not speech or text, but instead direct message transmissions between these ultra-advanced computers which are implanted in their brains (called Communicator Implants), making them effectively telepathic. Combined with the Xril equivalent of the internet, this means that you can instantly communicate with somebody on the other side of the planet just by thinking about it.

[Xon]

A new data storage medium which has ultra-low access latancies(either in the nanosecond to single digit millisecond range), high burt/sustainable bandwidth, which can contain massive quantities of data(terrabytes or the like) and was cheap as modern harddrives to make.

That would radically change the world of computing and everything else.

Were FedExing a datacube across the states is faster than DLing the contents

[CaptainChewbacca]

Sliders went to a world without lying once. Interesting.

[Guardsman Bass]

Actually, how about something like in Brave New World; a drug with little or no side-effects to its pleasure, like Soma? That would certainly screw with productivity and cause car accidents to rise, but maybe incidents of depression would go down, particularly if it was cheap.