In her novel The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand famously wrote, “Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light.” While Rand was making a point about the attitude humanity has towards genius, this also illustrates another simple principle of human history: develop a new technology, and it will be used for crime.

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The twenty-first century is not shaping up to be any different from previous epochs of human history. Even as we speak, scientists and engineers are developing amazing new technologies. Technologies that would easily be exploited by criminals. Here’s a glimpse at some of the crimes of tomorrow:

Remote Controlling People

Researchers at Nippon Telephone and Telegraph have developed a crude, headphone looking apparatus that actually allows a person to be remote controlled. To be sure, the technology is crude at this point. Right now the device works like this–a weak electric current is run behind the ears through the brain. This current allows an operator to remotely force a person to turn left or right against their will. There’s not much more to it that that.

Still, NT&T is still working on perfecting the technology with an eye for gaming. However, it’s not too hard to imagine some tweaks with this technology being coupled with our increasing understanding of the brain to produce “slave devices.” Imagine two electrodes placed behind your ears, which allows someone to actually control your body against your will. There are, of course, a number of criminal applications to this technology. You could remote control a person to commit murder. Or use the electrodes to prevent them from fighting off an assault. Or, depending on how refined the technology gets, actually control the person’s thoughts and feelings.

Not a pretty thought.

Becoming Invisible

One of the long time dreams of any criminal is the ability to become invisible. After all, it’s much easier to commit a crime if people can’t see you committing it or, if they do notice the crime, can’t identify the perpetrator. Lucky for criminals, scientists at UC Berkeley are working on an honest-to-Harry-Potter invisibility cloak:

Right now the cloak operates for light between 1,400 and 1,800 nanometers in wavelength, which is the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, just slightly longer than light that can be seen with the human eye. However, because of its all dielectric composition and design, Zhang says the cloak is relatively easy to fabricate and should be upwardly scalable. He is also optimistic that with more precise fabrication this all dielectric approach to cloaking should yield a material that operates for visible light - in other words, true invisibility to the naked eye.

“In this experiment, we have demonstrated a proof of concept for optical cloaking that works well in two dimensions” says Zhang. “Our next goal is to realize a cloak for all three dimensions, extending the transformation optics into potential applications.”

The criminal applications for invisibility technology are pretty obvious.

Forcible Memory Erasure: Eliminate Witnesses Without Killing Them

With most crimes, there is a victim. And that victim has a tendency to report their crimes to the police if they’re left alive. What’s more, even if a crime kills the victim, no plot is foolproof, and there’s always pesky eyewitnesses that are, if the crime is serious enough, required to be killed. Still, there’s no question that for most criminals, killing victims and eyewitnesses can be tricky. What was once a fairly lesser crime that might have been overlooked now becomes a homicide and is the focus of much more attention. How to solve this problem? With science!

Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical - the protein alpha-CaM kinase II - to successfully erase memories from the minds of mice. The memory losses, report the authors, are “not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories.” The erasure, moreover, “is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.”

While the goals of this research–curing PTSD related disorders–are admirable, the fact of the matter is that a pill which can delete traumatic memories is a gold mine for criminals. After all, being the victim of a crime is one of the most traumatic experiences a person can go through. This would be ideal for criminals. Mug somebody, then force-feed them a memory pill. Voila! No memory that the crime was ever committed! On the bright side, the existence of this pill might lead to fewer people getting killed so they “don’t talk.” On the down side, this would probably lead to more crimes going unsolved.

Conclusion

Given the next few decades of technological advancement, there’s no doubt that human life will be enhanced in many different and wonderful ways. But it’s easy to forget that there’s a dark side to technological advance. While in our imaginations, the dark side tends to take the form of horrible dystopias with governments and corporations run amok, it is far more likely that new technologies will simply be used to enhance the world of petty crimes and criminals. The question we face with these technologies is simple: what can we do to prevent them?