If you have been following my blog for a while now, you will already know that I simply love to keep up and talk about the latest happenings in the world of technology. It has been my passion since childhood.

I love how technological advancements can bring about positive change in people’s lives and how over the last few centuries the whole world has slowly started to feel more like the same city or country even, owing to our ability to get access to people and things within seconds these days.

But technology is also a double edged sword and history stands testament to that fact. Technological advancements in the wrong hands can do horrible things as you all know. And even the ones that are seemingly not harmful, are slowly shaping our civilization in a certain way.

Some of them are good but some others can lead us to a really dark future if not checked properly. We all are aware of what a dystopian world looks like thanks to the numerous movies on this topic. So, let’s take a look at some of these technologies that can plunge us into a dark world.

1. A Human Rating System

We are all habituated to rate everything, right? This has been really helpful as we can easily find out whether a restaurant is good enough to take your friends out for a dinner or whether an app or a game is good enough to download.

What about when the same rating system is introduced for us humans? Such a rating system, though totally not viable in today’s world, could stand as your social score and how “good” of a person you are.

This was visualized perfectly in one of Black Mirror’s episodes where they showed how such a system encourages people to be fake and only ratings-oriented and the life you can live would depend not on you but on your ratings which is based on the mercy of other raters.

I thought this system would never come to be in the real world. But a few months ago, I read some articles which stated that China was planning to introduce a “social credit system” to determine what kind of citizen you are. This would mean that every single activity of yours would be monitored and your whole life would be reduced to a number!

2. Augmented Reality On A Biological Level

Augmented reality is such a cutting edge technology that tech pundits are touting it as the replacement for smartphones. It’s basically a merger of the digital world and the real world but through headsets, and that is fine for today.

But as we have seen, technology just keeps evolving things like this and that will happen with augmented reality as well. What happens when instead of headsets, we gain the ability to experience augmented reality within our brains, through implants?

This is another thing that was visualized perfectly in one of the Black Mirror’s episodes where the character is put inside a horror augmented reality game which was constructed using his brain’s deepest, darkest fears, which ultimately led him to die.

I fear that such a technology will render us incapable of distinguishing between what is real and what is not and that scares me, because then we could easily end up being slaves to the controller of such a virtual and augmented reality.

3. Bio-enhancements

There is no doubt that this one is coming in the very near future. In fact, some bio-enhancements are already in use today and the really cutting edge ones are in their infancy.

What this technology does is basically enhances any or all of our capabilities as humans. For example, it could enhance the five senses so our eye sight or sense of smell becomes really strong (like a superhero). Or it could be used to increase our intelligence to a whole another level. The same could be done with our strength too.

These bio-enhancers would surely be developed for the world’s military because that’s where governments would think this should go first. Somehow war is always the first thing on their minds.

But think of a future where either just the army has these bio-enhancers or everyone has access to these. Such a world would be really chaotic because we are already adept at destroying ourselves and killing one another. Increasing the scope of our abilities would just make us into monsters and that is a really dark, dark future!!