Attention, loud cellphone talkers, overzealous horn honkers, inconsiderate cab drivers and other everyday pests. Your days may be numbered.
Thanks to the falling cost of microcontroller chips and the lure of easy online sales, inventors are turning out record numbers of gadgets. One growing subset of these inventions: Products that help people neutralize antisocial behaviour at the push of a button.
Quiet time: Radio Systems Corp.’s PetSafe brand plans to begin selling a birdhouse-shaped device designed to emit unpleasant ultrasonic squeals when it detects a dog barking.
The brains behind these devices range from entrepreneurs in suburban Los Angeles to graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A Tennessee company has created a $50 (about Rs2,000) device that shuts up other people’s dogs by answering their barks with an ultrasonic squeal that humans can’t hear (the unit is disguised as a birdhouse). British inventors are exporting a new product for people who hate lousy drivers—it’s a luminescent screen that fits in a car’s rear window and, at the driver’s command, flashes any one of five messages to other motorists. These include a smiley face, a sad face and phrases such as “Back Off” and “Idiot” (since the product’s US debut, the company says it has also received several requests for images of offensive hand gestures).
No-Contact Jacket
While many of these gadgets are built by small companies or basement tinkerers, the field has caught the attention of graduate students at MIT’s Media Lab, where it is known as “annoyancetech”. Among their recent creations: a “No-Contact Jacket” that, when activated with a controller, delivers a blast of electricity to anyone who touches the person wearing it. During a demonstration in Japan, co-creator Adam Whiton says it drew interest from women who were eager to retaliate against gropers on the subway.
“It’s becoming easier for people to imagine that technology is a conduit through which they will solve all their social problems,” says Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Media Lab’s Computing Culture group.
Edward Tenner, a historian and author of books on the consequences of technology, says he isn’t surprised that people are turning to gadgets. The idea of solving problems with a gadget rather than a direct confrontation makes more sense, he says, at a time when people are concerned about the growth of social explosions such as road rage. A study published last year in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that intermittent explosive disorder—characterized by recurrent, violent, out-of-proportion reactions—is more common than previously thought in the US and may be on the rise.