Should Inventors Be Blamed When People Repurpose Their Inventions Negatively?
I remember this event clearly...
I was suffering from pain, and one of my coworkers in the organisation where I worked, a female who had experience in the medical field because she is an auxiliary nurse, prescribed a drug for me. It was a syrup actually, so I went to the chemist shop close to us to buy the drug.
When I came back, as I was measuring the syrup with a lid, a customer walked in and started sounding funny about why I was about to use the drug. According to him, I wanted to meet a woman for fun and needed the drug to "last" very well. While I laughed with him, I could not believe how far someone’s imagination could go.
"Angela, apart from the symptom that made me buy this drug, what other functions does it serve?" I asked Angela as she walked into the hall from the kitchen, and she began to laugh.
I told her what the guy who saw me taking the medicine had said, and she concurred that it was true. Men actually use the drug to tackle "two-minute" run during fun. But that is just what people have chosen to discover about it, because the drug is actually meant for the sickness I bought it for, not for what people nowadays use it for.
This is actually one of the biggest problems in our era today. Inventors invent things that will be profitable and useful to the sector they were designed for, but people later devise other means to make use of those inventions, mostly for negative purposes. So, who should be blamed? It is the people who are fond of misusing the items or ideas that were invented.
Many of the abused drugs, products, or inventions today were created for good causes. However, people who claim to be smart have turned it into a business of tarnishing the image of such inventions through misuse.
You must have seen or heard about illegal production of drinks and drugs. The people go and buy chemicals(good chemicals originally invented to serve a purpose), and mix them together to produce drugs and medicines. So bad!
That said, this does not mean there are no inventions out there that were primarily created to promote crime. In some cases, people, seeing the magnitude of what an invention can do, begin to explore it for their own advantage and end up using it to harm lives. One day, while wandering around the online space, I came across a website that uses AI to digitally unclothe a person from a photo. There was a serious alarm raised on Twitter some years ago when someone created such an image of a celebrity, and the celebrity took it personal and hunted for the person responsible. This invention, though clearly a bad one, is not supposed to be used anyhow. It might probably have some legitimate use, but abuse by people will always overtake the actual purpose it was designed for.
Another angle to this repurposing of invented materials or ideas is that inventions can also be used in ways the inventor never imagined, and sometimes in a positive sense. You want to know how?
Back in the days when I was deeply into hunting for money on the internet, I knew several ways to bypass websites that restricted usage based on country or IP address. I easily bypassed those restrictions to get on with what I was targeting. Another example is the use of VPNs when Nigeria was restricted from using X (then Twitter). Some VPNs can be “wayward,” yet we still used them to bypass government rules. It was bad as we were breaking law but it was good at the same time.
Thanks for reading.
This is my entry to Week 204, Edition 01 of the Weekly Featured contest in Hive Learners Community