Halloween special: Asia’s creepiest, scariest tech

Halloween is almost upon us! And although the technology industry doesn’t tend to produce many good ghost stories, there’s plenty of tech out there that can scare you, or just give you the creeps.

So in honor of All Hallows’ Eve, the official holiday of creepy things, I present seven of the creepiest technologies out there in Asia right now. Read on at your own risk!

China’s Skynet

Earlier this month, Chinese authorities announced that – in the vein of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 – they have covered the entirety of Beijing with surveillance cameras. Presumably that applies only to public locations, but that still means that in a city of 20 million people there is now nowhere except your own home where you’re not being constantly filmed.

The purpose of this camera network is ostensibly to stop crime, but authorities have already used it to intimidate dissidents and dig into the personal lives of anyone perceived to be an opponent. Human rights lawyer Li Tiantian, for example, had Chinese government agents attempt to destroy her romantic relationship by showing her boyfriend surveillance video of her entering hotels with other men.

The best part? This network of surveillance cameras is genuinely named Skynet. That is its official name. Yes, China gave its domestic surveillance system the same name as the evil AI from the Terminator movies. Now that’s creepy.

Otonaroid, Kodomoroid, and Actroid

Now for something to make your skin crawl: the robot creations of Hiroshi Ishiguro, a humanoid robotics professor at Osaka University. Japan has produced a lot of robots, but no one seems to be making them quite as creepy as Mr. Ishiguro.

Otonaroid and Kodomoroid (top video) and Actroid (bottom video) are textbook examples of uncanny valley creepy: robots that look human, but not human enough to keep our brains from noticing that something is wrong. There are a number of theories for why people get creeped out by things that look almost human but can’t quite make the cut, but whatever the reason, there’s no denying that if you saw one of these things in the woods at night, you’d run the other way fast.

Telenoid

Human rental

China’s “Great Cannon”

Drones

Deep Speech