Inventors who came to regret their inventions -

These are the inventors who wished their path-breaking ideas had remained on the drawing board.

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Mikhail Kalashnikov and the AK-47 -

The late Mikhail Kalashnikov, who served in a tank unit during the beginning of WWII and had already invented improvements for tanks, was tasked with building a rifle that could help Russian firepower keep up with that of Germany's and compete against them. His automatic weapon proved durable, lightweight, and extremely popular—too popular for his liking.

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Mikhail Kalashnikov and the AK-47 -

His invention became a favorite among warlords and terrorists, and to this day continues to be responsible for more deaths than any other assault rifle. Kalashnikov, who died in 2013, told The Guardian, "I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work—for example a lawn mower."

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Geoffrey Hinton and AI -

Geoffrey Hinton and two other so-called "Godfathers of AI" won the 2018 Turing Award for their foundational work that paved the way for the current boom in artificial intelligence. But now Hinton told The New York Times that he regrets his life's work, and he even quit his job at Google so that he could speak about it freely.

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Geoffrey Hinton and AI -

Hinton now wants to speak openly about the risks of AI, from the spread of misinformation to the elimination of jobs, and even to the concern that AI could get smarter than people as it begins to write and run its own code. "I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away," Hinton said of that possibility. "Obviously, I no longer think that." He said his consolation is that if it wasn't him, it would have been somebody else to develop it. "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things."

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Ethan Zuckerman and pop-up ads -

The beginning of the pop-up ad is funnier than most people know. One of Zuckerman's advertising clients freaked out after their ad appeared on a page celebrating an explicit kind of sex, because, as a major car company, they didn't want to be associated with that.

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Ethan Zuckerman and pop-up ads -

Zuckerman then invented a way to get ads on popular sites without seeming to be associated with the content on the page, aka the pop-up ad. "We ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit: The pop-up ad. I'm sorry. Our intentions were good," Zuckerman said in an essay in The Atlantic.

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Victor Gruen and the shopping mall -

In the 1940s and '50s, as suburbs developed and people lived farther away from downtown shops, Victor Gruen had the idea to create a communal area where people could walk around and do their shopping while also enjoying green spaces, art, and other things. His first iteration in Detroit was notably not enclosed in a single building…

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Victor Gruen and the shopping mall -

Others latched onto this idea but made it all indoors and removed all the green space and art so that there could be more room for shops. In 1978, two years before he died, Gruen said: "I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those b*stard developments. They destroyed our cities." He didn't even live to see how much worse it got after the '80s.

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John Sylvan and coffee capsules -

The inventor of the Keurig coffee maker K-cup doesn't have a machine himself, he told The Atlantic. You might wonder why, since those single-serve plastic coffee pods are everywhere, so surely he has the money?

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John Sylvan and coffee capsules -

Well, Sylvan actually argues in favor of drip coffee now. He feels regret that the pods aren't recyclable or biodegradable, resulting in more harmful landfill. "I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it," he admitted. "It's like a cigarette for coffee, a single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance."

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Wally Conron and the Labradoodle -

 In the '80s, Wally Conron, puppy-breeding manager for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia, was given the task to create a non-shedding guide dog for a blind woman whose husband was allergic. He created a cross between a Golden Labrador Retriever and a standard poodle called a Labradoodle, which is now reportedly the most sought-after hybrid dog in the world. And it also spurred on the creation of many other poodle hybrids.

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Wally Conron and the Labradoodle -

Unfortunately, the poodle hybrid suffers many problems with their eyes, hips, and elbows, and they often suffer from epilepsy. "I opened a Pandora's box, that's what I did," Conron told Psychology Today of the harmful trend of designer dogs. "So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy."

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Robert Propst and the office cubicle -

Robert Propst came up with the idea that became the office cubicle in the '60s, when employees were distracted and needed privacy and quiet in the workplace. It had good intentions, as he told The New York Times in 1997. It was designed to "give knowledge workers a more flexible, fluid environment than the rat-maze boxes of offices." But it was quickly taken advantage of.

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Robert Propst and the office cubicle -

Companies soon saw the invention of the cubicle as a way to squeeze more people into the same space, forcing employees into cramped little squares. "The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity," Propst lamented.

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Anna Jarvis and Mother's Day -

Anna Jarvis created Mother's Day out of a genuine love for her mother and all mothers everywhere. The first day was celebrated on May 10, 1908, and she sent her mother 500 white carnations in her honor. But things spiraled out of control and Jarvis ended up hating the day she invented.

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Anna Jarvis and Mother's Day -

What soured her enjoyment was the way the sentiment became so commercialized, so fast. In a press release, she dubbed the florist, greeting card, and confectionery industries "charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations."

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Scott Fahlman and the emoticon -

Emoticon, emoji, stickers—whatever you call them, you've received at least one. These little reaction images can often replace text nowadays, and they come coded with various meanings. So why does inventor Scott Fahlman regret making them?

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Scott Fahlman and the emoticon -

The computer science professor initially created emoticons as a way to let someone know that there's a joke in an email or text message, but the joke has gone too far in his eyes. "Sometimes I feel like Dr. Frankenstein," he told The Wall Street Journal. "My creature started as benign but it's gone places I don't approve of."

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Albert Einstein and his famous equation -

Albert Einstein's famous E = mc² helped scientists create the atomic bomb, which Einstein even urged President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 to pursue because he believed the Germans were developing their own.

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Albert Einstein and his famous equation -

Then the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shone a light on the true horror of his work. In 1947, he lamented to Newsweek that if he had "known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing."

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J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb -

More close to being the actual "father of the atomic bomb" was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory who directed the development of the bomb. He and many of the other Manhattan Project staff expressed regret after the bombing of Nagasaki, which they felt was unnecessary.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb -

Oppenheimer later stated that he felt like he had blood on his hands, and to make some kind of amends he began working with the US Atomic Energy Commission to control the use of nuclear weapons.

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Philo Farnsworth and television -

Philo Farnsworth helped invent the television after WWI in the hopes that it would help families and communities share stories, become less ignorant, and even contribute to world peace. It was meant to be a tool for learning.

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Philo Farnsworth and television -

Farnsworth died in 1971 with the feeling, however, that television was, as it was called in the media, "the opiate of the people." He felt that people wasted their lives watching TV and even reportedly forbade his son to watch it.

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Alfred Bernhard Nobel and dynamite -

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist who made a significant shift in his career after creating dynamite in the 1860s. He created it to help his family's mining business, but armies started using it to kill their enemies.

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Alfred Bernhard Nobel and dynamite -

It was a false obituary that led him to change his path. In 1888, his brother Ludwig died, but the papers made a mistake and thought it was Alfred who had died, calling him "the merchant of death" and writing that he "became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before." Nobel was filled with remorse and later bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize.

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Kamran Loghman and pepper spray -

Kamran Loghman worked for the FBI and created pepper spray as a weapon in the 1980s as a non-lethal way to pacify someone at range who is threatening a police officer or other citizen. He also wrote the guide for police departments specifying how it should be used.

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Kamran Loghman and pepper spray -

While today we hear constantly about the abuse of pepper spray by police officers, it was a specific incident at the University of California in 2011, when police used pepper spray on "docile protesters," that made him regret his creation. He said in The New York Times: "I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents."

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Tim Berners Lee and the // -

Tim Berners Lee is the English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. While there are many regrettable things on and around the internet, it's actually the double slash at the beginning of web addresses that he regrets most.

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Tim Berners Lee and the // -

"Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //," he said, according to Business Insider.

See also: Women's inventions and discoveries that were credited to men

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