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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Since at least 1970, every decade there seems to be a, "The VR take over is here!" fad and it falls flat every time.
Those VR rollercoaster shuttle rides in malls during the 1980s and early 1990s, thinking that is the future, oh boy, we were all so silly.
cars.
we're in too deep now, investment bias prevents changing strategy
No no no. There will always be solutions to the problems they cause.
They kill billions of animals every year but we can build nature overpasses. They kill millions of humans every year but we can blame pedestrians for wearing headphones or not looking properly. The tires shed about a quarter of all microplastics in the environment in Canada but surely we will find a technological solution for that eventually. The parking spaces still cause heat islands but we can just cover them with solar panels. Parking also causes flooding because of impervious surfaces but we can just resurface all of them with new materials.
~~And soon cars will all run on hydrogen and be totally environmentally friendly.~~ And soon cars will all run on electricity and be totally environmentally friendly. Everyone on the planet just has to buy a new car eventually, keep buying cars, and spend (buy!) energy to move them everywhere they go. But they will be environmentally friendly! Except for all the other issues but surely we will find solutions for them. Save the planet by getting an electric car, the biggest and most expensive consumption object, and have a taste of freedom when paying to fill it with energy.
/s just in case.
the automobile is the perfect vehicle for a speedy fuite en avant ! not sure how to translate that, flight forward ? rush forward ?
ai
pretty much, we will never make it like CYLon level, or skynet level intelligent. the former requires a human mind in a convoluted process, which is probably more realistic than skynet/kaylon.
Printer drivers.
Apparently sending data serially at glacial speeds is impossible.
The LaserJet 4P driver was the GOAT. It worked on every HP printer for years. It's been all downhill since.
Probably not top ten of mind, but Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been trotted out by the fossil fuel industry for a generation as a panacea for carbon emissions, in order to prevent any real legislation limiting the combustion of hydrocarbons.
Doesn't sound like it failed at its purpose in that case
I'll go against the grain and say literally all of it. Every piece of technology that exists is a compromise between what the designer wants to do and the constraints of what is practical or possible to actually pull off. Therefore, all technology "fails" on at least some metric the designer would like it to achieve. Technology is all about improvement and working with imperfection. If we don't keep trying to make things better, then innovation stops. With your example of VR, I'd say that after having seen multiple versions of VR in my lifetime, the one that we have now is way more successful and impactful, especially in commercial uses rather than consumer products. Engineers can now tour facilities before they are built with VR headsets to see design flaws that they might not have seen just with a traditional model review, for example. Furthermore, what we have now is just an iteration on what we had before. It doesn't happen in a vacuum, people take what came before, look at what worked and what didn't, and what could be fixed with other technologies that have developed in the meantime. That's the iteration process.
Iteration isn't a claim that the predecessor was a failure though, you iterate on the successes of the prior generation. It used to be that technology advanced so rapidly that the cutting edge became obsolete in a matter of a few years, but for that time it was a success.
I think there's also an assumption of design philosophy here. One designer might put many generalized requirements into their design, then you get Google glasses, AI, NFTs and so on. This means everything is a failure because it couldn't achieve the requirements. Others may pick a small set of very specific requirements, then you get the iPhone or a Toyota hilux. These are massive successes because they had cohesion in the idea and planned as to about compromise.
Pesticides.
We came up with this brilliant idea of planting a single crop per field which creates the perfect environment for the things we call "pests". We invented pesticides to kill the pests, which incidentally also kill their predators and competitors, making the environment even more favorable when the pest returns. So we started using more and stronger pesticides, creating a dependency cycle, with the added bonus of poisoning the ground, the water table, the oceans and ourselves.
"Smart" TVs. Somehow they have replaced normal televisions despite being barely usable, laggy, DRM infested garbage.
Curious what your preferred streaming box is, considering changing my Android TV so that it launches to HDMI, disconnect from internet, use a streaming box that isn't as slow and has a hardwired connection instead.
They are surveilance- and ad delivery platorms. The user experience is as bad as the consumer can tolerate. They work as intended.
So I have a contentious one. Quantum computers. (I am actually a physicist, and specialised in qunatum back in uni days, but now work mainly in in medical and nuclear physics.)
Most of the "working": quantum computers are experiments where the outcome has already been decided and the factoring they do can be performed on 8 bit computers or even a dog.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an
8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog"
This paper is a hilarious explanation of the tricks being pulled to get published.
But then again, it is a nascent technology, and like fusion, I believe it will one day be a world changing technology, but in it's current state is a failure on account of the bullshittery being published. Then again such publications are still useful in the grand scheme of developing the technology, hence why the article I cited is good humoured but still making the point that we need to improve our standards. Plus who doesnt like it when an article includes dogs.
Anyway, my point is, some technologies will be constant failures, but that doesn't mean we should stop.
A cure for cancer is a perfect example. Research has been going on for a century and cumulatively amassed 100s of billions of dollars of funding. It has failed constantly to find a cure, but our understanding of the disease, treatment, how to conduct research, and prevention have all massively increased.
A cure for cancer is a perfect example. Research has been going on for a century and cumulatively amassed 100s of billions of dollars of funding. It has failed constantly to find a cure, but our understanding of the disease, treatment, how to conduct research, and prevention have all massively increased.
Cancer != cancer. There are hundreds of types of cancer. Many types meant certain death 50 years ago and can be treated and cured now with high reliability. "The" cure for cancer likely doesn't exist because "the" cancer is not a singular thing, but a categorization for a type of diseases.
I'm going to get downvoted for this
Open source has its place, but the FOSS community needs to wake up to the fact that documentation, UX, ergonomics, and (especially) accessibility aren't just nice-to-haves. Every year has been "The Year of the Linux Desktop™" but it never takes off, and it never will until more people who aren't developers get involved.
If you make that argument about the state of software in general, I'd agree to an extent in the sense that it should be more prioritized. But I don't see how that applies to open source in particular?
In those aspects proprietary software is just as bad, if not even worse. The difference is simply that the default choice of software for most tasks is a proprietary software. They can have a shit ton of unusable and confusing mess, even intentional dark patterns, but users will adapt.
There's a reason why Apple is the poster child for accessibility. They control the entire stack from hardware to OS, and have an ocean of money to devote to what is effectively a tiny marginalized portion of their user base.
Open source is the exact opposite. Any given open source project (especially any given Linux distro) is standing atop a precarious mound of other open source projects that the distro maintainers themselves have no control over. So when accessibility breaks, the maintainers say "It's not us, it's GNOME". Then GNOME says "It's not us, it's Wayland", and so on.
Imagine I handed you a laptop without a working screen, then when you complain you can't use it, I said "It's not my problem" or "We'll get to it eventually" or "I wouldn't know how to help you" That's desktop Linux when you're blind.
Apologies if this comes across as a rant. I'm just bitter about the fact there's all this free, privacy-respecting software out there that's out of my reach, and I'm stuck selling my soul to Microsoft and Apple.
Not here to downvote. But I will say there is some good changes as of the past five years.
From a personal perspective: there's a lot of GOOD open-source software that has great user experiences. VLC. Bitwarden. OBS. Joplin. Jitsi.
Even WordPress (the new Blocks editor not the ugly classic stuff) in the past decade has a lot of thought and design for end users.
For all the GIMP/Libre office software that just has backwards ass choices for UX, or those random terminal apps that require understanding the command line -- they seem to be the ones everyone complains about and imprinted as "the face of open-source". Which is a shame.
There's so much good open-source projects that really do focus on the casual non technical end user.
While you generally have a point, the year of the linux desktop is not hindered by that. Distributions like Linux Mint, Ubuntu and the like are just as easy to install as Windows, the desktop environments preinstalled on them work very good and the software is more than sufficient for like 70% to 80% of people (not counting anything, that you cannot install with a single click from the app store/software center of the distribution.
Though Linux is not the default. Windows is paying big time money to be the default. So why would "normal people" switch? Hell, most people will just stop messaging people instead of installing a different messenger on their phone. Installing a different OS on your PC/Notebook is a way bigger step than that.
So probably we won't get the "Year of the Linux Desktop", unless someone outpays Microsoft for quite some time, or unless microsoft and Windows implode by themselves (not likely either)
Encryption with safe, unexploitable backdoors.
"unexploitable backdoor" is a contradiction.
AI, Mass Surveillance and privatization of services people need to live and National security technology
Flying cars.
Maybe like super-thin phones and foldables/rollable phones. Most people have no need or use for them tbh
I don't want a phone so thin and slippery I can't hold it in my hand. I want a phone as thicc as an old gray brick Game Boy. When I drop it on the floor I want to have to replace the floor. I want a battery that will outlast the lifespan of the sun.
AI,
The big one would be viable nuclear fusion, we've been trying to figure it out and spending money on it for like 80 years now.
That being said, there's actually a lot of verified progress on it lately by reputable organizations and international teams.
Twitter/X. It is not a free speech platform. Give it up and move on to something else. Stop supporting these billionaires and stop giving them your time.
Social media as a whole, honestly. Way back in 2014 I read an article about the "social media cycle" (not their words IIRC). Basically, a new platform gets popular with teens and college-age kids, then their parents join, then the kids have to move to something else because they don't want to be on the same platform as their parents. I could be misremembering. It was a comparison between Facebook and Snapchat.
Anyway, the Fediverse helps, but since fedi platforms are largely clones of their normie counterparts (Lemmy/PieFed = reddit, Mastodon = Twitter, PeerTube = YouTube) they inherit many of the same problems. I know I bring this up a lot, but on these platforms, content is the focus, but on traditional forums, people are the focus.
Flying cars. The idea has intuitive appeal
just drive like normal, but most congestion problems go away!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
We've made them, but the tradeoffs that you have to make to get a good road vehicle that is also a good aircraft are very large. The benefits of having a dual-mode vehicle are comparatively limited. I think that absent some kind of dramatic technological revolution, like, I don't know, making the things out of nanites, we'll just always be better off with dedicated vehicles of the first sort or the second.
Maybe we could have call-on-demand aircraft that could air-ferry ground vehicles, but I think that with something on the order of current technology, that's probably as close as we'll get.
