The Top Eight Safety Attempts That Totally Backfired | SPIKE

It's a rule: any kind of technology will have unexpected side effects.  Just like nobody thought UNIVAC would wind up destroying the music industry, or that YouTube would make cats more popular than humans, sometimes attempts to make things safer and more decent backfire.  Whether it's just making your morning commute that much more annoying to giving you cancer, here are some "safety" ideas that should have died on the drawing board.

Source: Johannes Kroemer/Stockbyte/Getty Images

By Dan Seitz

8. Electric Cars Make Car Stereos Just That Much More Annoying

All right, so we admit that a car that sounds like one of the spinners from Blade Runner is actually kind of awesome.  And it's nice they want to warn pedestrians with some sort of noise to replace the roar of an engine as it burns through a red light.  Or would be, if we only had to hear it once.  It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out that hearing nothing but those, constantly, all day, on your commute would slowly drive you crazy.

So leave it to carmakers, who clearly don't understand the concept of "noise pollution" or "everybody really, really hates the guy with the $5,000 sound system in his car" to cross this with the idea of selling "car tones."  Yes, ringtones for your car.  So now, instead of hearing the jerk in front of you blow out his muffler, you can be subjected to an endless thirty-second-loop of some top 40 hit all the way to work!  Or even better, he'll hook up his iPod, turning his car into a cross between the Top 40 station from hell and an ice cream truck.

7. BioBags Designed for Hippies, Make The Earth They Love So Sad

Source: BioBagUSA.com

While having a rotting trash bag may not sound awesome, the idea is that instead of being the black plastic sheets that seem to be made of tissue paper instead of dead dinosaurs, which stick around forever, BioBags will rot away into the comforting fecund bosom of Mother Earth.

...Who's sweating her butt off from all the greenhouse gases those biodegradable bags put out.  The idea is that bacteria chow down on these bags, but the thing is, the bacteria can turn these bags into methane, which in addition to being the key to lighting farts is also a potent greenhouse gas (PDF).  It is, in fact, such a risk of pumping this crap into the atmosphere, even the hippies who buy these things don't use them for anything other than compost.  So, nice try, hippies, but the dinosaurs win again!

6. Child-Safety Software Monitors Everything Your Kids Do and Then Sells It To Marketing Departments

Source: EchoMetrix

While we don't have, and don't want, kids ourselves, we can understand parents wanting to protect their kids.  After all, Chris Hansen found pedophiles on the Internet every week!  Of course, if it blocks the websites of certain fine upstanding cable networks, or more specifically, episodes of The Deadliest Warrior, which are vital in leading growing boys to a healthy manhood, then it's terrible software and you should delete it.

Of course, you might also want to delete it because it might be recording the IM conversations of children and selling them to the highest bidder.  But hey, at least you don't have to worry about those pedophiles.  Just monolithic corporations knowing everything about your kids.

5. Airbags Hate Your Face

Source: Don Johnston/Stone/Getty Images

Airbags are a great safety innovation.  Instead of your face hitting a thick chunk of rubber and plastic at high speed, you hit a cushion of air.  What could go wrong with that?

Airbags are designed to keep you from dying, not keep you looking pretty, and to do that, they have to deploy really fast.  So fast they can literally send you flying if you sit on one. So chances are if they deploy, unless you're wearing your seatbelt, you have a pretty good chance of slamming your melon right into what amounts to an air ram. In fact, seatbelts actually do a better job of keeping your handsome features in place than airbags according to one study. On the other hand, you can't set up a seatbelt to go off hilariously in someone's face, so you take the good with the bad.