No
Regrets

The Wright brothers hoped flight might make war less likely by making armies easier to observe and surprise attacks harder to hide.

Aviation instead became central to modern warfare, including strategic bombing. Orville later said he did not regret inventing the airplane, even as he deplored the destruction it enabled.

Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction and later pushed the Einstein letter because he feared Nazi Germany might build an atomic bomb first.

After Germany surrendered, Szilard organized Manhattan Project scientists to petition against using the bomb on Japan without warning. The petition never reached President Truman.

The Manhattan Project raced to build an atomic bomb while Nazi Germany was still at war.

Germany surrendered before the weapon was used. The project continued, and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that August.

After being wounded in World War II, Kalashnikov set out to make a rifle Soviet soldiers could rely on in mud, sand, and cold.

The same simplicity and durability made Kalashnikov-pattern rifles unusually easy to manufacture, distribute, and keep working in conflicts around the world.

As a graduate student, Galston studied plant-growth chemicals that could make soybeans flower earlier and extend their growing season.

That research became one scientific stepping stone toward defoliants later weaponized in Vietnam. Galston spent years campaigning against their military use.

Oklahoma wanted an execution method considered more humane than the electric chair. Chapman, the state medical examiner, sketched out a three-drug protocol.

The protocol spread across the United States without the kind of clinical testing that would normally accompany a medical procedure, and was often administered under difficult conditions.

Jick and a colleague published a five-sentence letter reporting that addiction was rare among hospitalized patients receiving narcotics under medical supervision.

The narrow observation was repeatedly cited as broader evidence that addiction was rare among patients treated with opioids.

Portenoy argued that excessive fear of addiction was leaving people in severe pain without adequate treatment.

Limited evidence was stretched into much broader claims as opioid prescribing expanded. Portenoy later acknowledged that he had overstated what was known about addiction risk.

Sylvan wanted office workers to get one fresh cup of coffee instead of drinking from a pot that had been sitting for hours.

Single-serve coffee became a mass-market convenience and created an enormous stream of disposable packaging.

Farnsworth imagined television as an educational and unifying medium: a way to spread knowledge and perhaps reduce ignorance and war.

He became deeply disappointed by commercial television and restricted it in his own home. Then he watched the Apollo 11 moon landing and told his wife that television had finally made itself worthwhile.

An advertiser did not want its banner displayed directly beside a user’s sexual content. Opening the ad in a separate browser window solved the immediate problem.

The pop-up became one of the web’s most hated formats. More consequentially, it belonged to an advertising model that became one of the web’s dominant ways of paying for itself.

Twitter users were already copying and pasting other people’s posts. Wetherell helped build a button that turned the whole process into one tap.

The same frictionless sharing that could amplify overlooked voices also made misinformation and pile-ons much easier to spread.

Rosenstein was one of the Facebook engineers who helped create an easy way to send a small bit of positivity without leaving a comment.

Social approval became a number. Rosenstein later removed social apps from his own phone and used parental controls to limit his access.

Pagination was clumsy. Infinite scroll let people move through content without repeatedly clicking “next.”

It also removed a natural stopping point. Raskin later became a prominent critic of persuasive interface design.

Propst designed the Action Office after years of studying how people actually worked. He wanted a flexible system that gave workers more control over their space, movement, and privacy.

Employers and competitors learned to use modular office panels to pack more people into cheaper, denser layouts — the outcome Propst later denounced.

Benna found a way to use an obscure tax-code provision to help employees save for retirement. He says the biggest benefit was turning spenders into savers.

He does not regret creating the 401(k), but he became disturbed by features that accumulated around it — especially fees and investment expenses shifted onto workers.

Burr helped write NIST guidance intended to make passwords stronger: complexity requirements, special characters, and frequent changes.

The guidance became compliance doctrine. Users adapted with predictable substitutions, written-down passwords, and small variations on old ones. NIST later reversed much of the advice.

The Viennese émigré architect imagined the mall as part of a walkable suburban town center with shops, housing, schools, medical care, and public space.

Developers mostly kept the enclosed retail box and parking lot. Gruen later disowned the car-dependent developments that carried his idea forward.

After several miscarriages, Karvunidis celebrated reaching the point in a pregnancy when she could learn the baby’s sex. Her family cut into a cake with pink filling and she wrote about it online.

The idea became an escalating genre of spectacle involving explosives, aircraft, and pyrotechnics.

Hinton helped pioneer the modern deep-learning approach, sticking with neural networks through long periods when much of the field had moved on.

The approach worked far better than almost anyone expected. Hinton left Google in 2023 so he could speak more freely about risks he believes increasingly capable AI could pose.