Three tech innovations that are ever so slightly dystopian.

There’s a lot of moral panic around technology. Is social media rotting our brains? Are our phones, now constantly wedded to our hands, ruining our love lives and friendships? Are we capable of paying attention to anything for longer than 15 seconds at a time? The success of Mr Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror highlights our collective unease about the modern world. And with season five on the horizon, the show’s title has become universal shorthand for our technological worries.

Largely, we hope, these panics are based on nothing. But sometimes pieces of tech emerge that really do have a sinister edge. Here are three of them.

Developed by researchers at MIT Media Lab, the AlterEgo headset can “hear” your inner voice. Essentially, in perfect dystopian style, it can read your mind.

The headset uses bone-conduction headphones to “transmit vibrations through the bones of the face” to the inner ear. Electrodes then pick up signals from the face, triggered by the inner use of particular words, before an AI deep-learning system parses what’s been silently “said”.

Researcher Ms Pattie Maes has described current technology use as “very disruptive”, and she doesn’t mean in the Silicon Valley sense. “If I want to look something up that’s relevant to a conversation I’m having, I have to find my phone and type in the passcode and open an app and type in some search keyword, and the whole thing requires that I completely shift attention from my environment and the people that I’m with to the phone itself,” she says.

It’s not all bad. Beyond the more nefarious uses such technology could have, it may have some positive benefits. When similar technology was developed in Japan in 2017, researchers pointed out that it could give people who have lost their speech the ability to communicate again. Not so dystopian after all.

There’s been a lot of talk about deep fakes, videos produced by deep-learning tools that allow anyone to superimpose one moving image onto another. As is the way of the internet, deep fakes have been used primarily for two things: porn and politics. In the wrong hands, it’s dangerous stuff, allowing anyone with access to the technology to literally put words into somebody else’s mouth.

Perhaps even more uncanny is so-called Deep Voice software. Created by Chinese tech company Baidu, the algorithm can mimic any human voice with just 3.7 seconds of audio. The more audio files it receives, the better the outcome. It can even change the tone, accent or gender of the voices it generates.

Researchers described their work as having “significant applications” in terms of human-machine interface and the personalisation of robots. But it’s easy to see how, much like deep fake videos, the technology could be used to misrepresent someone.

Amazon has been a pioneer in the vaguely threatening technology department with its Echo range, a device that sits in your home potentially listening to your most private and precious conversations.

And patents for its newest piece of technology, a wristband that could track workers’ hand movements, show no signs of erring from the company’s vaguely dystopian path.

The device, which is worn like a bracelet, uses an internal tracking system to monitor hand movements. This, according to the patent, would then show whether workers picked up the right item from the right location on a warehouse shelf. It would also use pulses and vibrations to give “tactile feedback” to workers who placed items in the wrong place.

The company has been criticised in the past for its workplace culture, particularly its use of tracking technologies to monitor exactly how efficiently its warehouse staff are working. It’s this history that makes the wristband, already an act of potentially unnecessary surveillance, even more creepy.

Keep up to date with The Daily by signing up to our weekly email roundup. Click here to update your email preferences.