28 votes

The worst technology failures of 2023

6 comments

  1. [5]
    Minty
    Link
    Titan wasn't a "technology" failure, it was negligence and greed failure. There's plenty of submarines that work. Lab-grown meat is still under development, it's like calling space flight a...

    Titan wasn't a "technology" failure, it was negligence and greed failure. There's plenty of submarines that work.

    Lab-grown meat is still under development, it's like calling space flight a failure in late 1950s. We all knew scaling it up was hard from the beginning. Though I too am disappointed with the progress.

    Self-driving cars, as much as I don't like them, also slowly move forward. And backward. And park. The tech has the advantage over meat in how it can progress little by little and still add value. Just because some companies try to shoot for the Moon and end up falling into the Sun doesn't mean parking or traffic assist is a failure.

    Plastic is nihil novi, why would it be the failure of 2023 specifically? We have a hundred alternatives for plastic, and most of them basically just as bad—perhaps they should make the list.

    Ai Pin is an apparently desirable idea with poor execution, again. We've had so many clunky, ugly bodycam concepts. At this point just make it into a huge eye necklace, and drop the "humane" act, we all know it'll violate everyone's privacy. Make it glow red when it detects a face of someone you don't like. Maybe that'll work.

    LK-99... definitely fits. Quite a flop. Killed many hopes.

    But rogue solar geoengineering... Jesus f'in' Christ. On one hand, I get it. Governments are frustratingly deep in their stockholders' pockets and inert in the face of a growing threat of climactic hell on Earth. I genuinely sympathize. But blotting out the Sun in a panicked, clandestine response is worse.

    21 votes
    1. Moogles
      Link Parent
      Re: AI Pin. My desire is to have less technology in my life, and phone dependency—or addiction as the article words it—is something I’d like to reduce. To drill down more, I think it’s to have...

      Re: AI Pin. My desire is to have less technology in my life, and phone dependency—or addiction as the article words it—is something I’d like to reduce.

      To drill down more, I think it’s to have technology that acts more as a force multiplier and less as an attention trap. I feel like most digital products are designed to keep users continually engaged for the purpose of advertising to us, and it’s exhausting.

      For example, I think we got close with something like the Amazon Echo Show’s. The idea that there could be displays throughout your home to show you relevant information on demand. Like a display in the kitchen is dedicated to showing recipes, a display by the coat closet shows the weather, and display in the office shows my work calendar. But the execution is the display just guesses what I want for a speech prompt at best, but in most cases it just sits there and tries to bait me with clickbait articles and ads for Amazon products. If I actually want a recipe I can’t just ask my smart devices or my phone to do that. I actually have to troll through search results to find a reputable source, then scroll past their life story to find the actual info I need.

      So the technology fails me and then I realized, well I could just write my favorite recipes on a post it note and place it on the inside of my cabinets. Now I have exactly the info I need displayed in the place I need it and it cost me $5 for the paper and pen to do it (and it’ll probably last a decade).

      10 votes
    2. [3]
      zipf_slaw
      Link Parent
      I disagree - they tried to use a new technology to advance the field, and they failed. Whether or not it was a good idea, or whether negligence or greed were involved, has no bearing on whether or...

      Titan wasn't a "technology" failure, it was negligence and greed failure. There's plenty of submarines that work.

      I disagree - they tried to use a new technology to advance the field, and they failed. Whether or not it was a good idea, or whether negligence or greed were involved, has no bearing on whether or not they were deploying tech no one had before in that field.

      5 votes
      1. Minty
        Link Parent
        The company lied about cooperation with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington, and the submersible's depth rating. The machine would be perfectly fine if it used properly rated and tested...

        The company lied about cooperation with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington, and the submersible's depth rating. The machine would be perfectly fine if it used properly rated and tested components, which it didn't. For goodness sake, they replaced the tested, but breaking hull with used, expired carbon fiber composite (purchased purely because it was discounted), and apparently never tested it before the deep dive. Which is suspected to be the main cause.

        That material was new in the field, but there were deeper dives before that. Such depths were new for the private sector, but not the field.

        What else is it but greed?

        3 votes
      2. Grumble4681
        Link Parent
        Yeah I'd agree that one does sort of constitute a failure. There's many disqualifications you could add to just about anything you could add on this list, let alone just saying "negligence and...

        Yeah I'd agree that one does sort of constitute a failure. There's many disqualifications you could add to just about anything you could add on this list, let alone just saying "negligence and greed" which would cover so many things on their own. If we go back a few years to Boeing's MCAS disaster, arguably to me that's a technology failure, but yes it was negligence, greed, terrible management leading to poor designs and poor instructions/training etc.

        Or go back several years to Theranos, is the technology they were selling a failure or was it just negligence and greed?

        I get it, I can't strap on a pair of paper wings and jump off a skyscraper and call it a technology failure when I don't end up flying. There's obviously some real limits to what should qualify.

        The idea of technology failure I guess could either be seen as just too general to easily define or too nebulous so I'm sure everyone will have a different idea or set of criteria in mind, enough where there's got to be some leeway in interpretation. To me, something being new and not thoroughly or more definitively proven to not work (like my basic paper wings would be rather definitive in their status of not working) while also being something enough people believed would actually work or had some potential in general likely qualify something into that category of technology failure should it actually fail. It needs some kind of plausibility. Probably also not just a minor segment of people believing, obviously you can get any number of people on board with any wacko conspiracy, but also perhaps like some form of money invested or institutional investments etc. Likely also to get on a list like this it would need to be something significant or newsworthy in some way.

        To me the Titan submersible counts, even though a lot of experts in that field were raising warning signals about it, it did make several trips, people were spending money to do it, some people clearly believed it was safe, it was pretty significant in what it was doing in terms of trying to make the deep sea more accessible to people. I also don't think it had been done before in that manner, to me it's a technology failure.

        I would say certain nascent industries like lab grown meat seem a little too early to be calling failures. I'm sure there's still going to be money invested into those ventures and it's still anticipated to be potential market and scaling struggles is not the same as hitting a wall with no answers. Currently I don't think there are many flocking to OceanGate looking to hand them a bunch of money to iterate on their Titan submersible. In a way, calling lab grown meat a failure would be like saying deep sea diving is a failure because of the Titan submersible, which that wasn't what was on the list of failures and that would be kinda dumb to make that claim. Deep sea diving as a whole isn't a technology failure, just OceanGate's failed product.