Every once in a while, someone comes along with the world’s greatest invention — or so they say. New devices come about all the time, but few have the societal impact of actually changing the world.

Most new inventions offer a slight improvement on previous designs, or they might even offer something unique. Still, changing the world with a single invention is rare, and not every new thing is going to be the next radio, television, or Internet.

These ten devices made such a claim, but despite being praised upon their introduction to the world, they completely failed to change it.

10 Dangerous Misconceptions About Nuclear Technology

10 Flying Tanks

Believe it or not, there was once a time when people thought it was a good idea to strap a couple of wings to an armored tank and use it in combat. Flying tanks were designed to take the firepower of armored combat and combine it with the tactical use of airpower, but as you probably can guess, it didn’t exactly work.

Essentially, these were glider wings attached to tanks, and they could be towed or carried beneath an airplane. They would then be released and glide into combat to support infantry operations on the battlefield. They were marginally effective, but various projects never achieved much success.

Instead of changing the way humanity fights in war, the concept was scrapped shortly after World War II, though the Soviet Union continued developing the concept well into the 1970s.

While flying tanks have become a thing of the past, they’ve largely been replaced by modern technology. The AC-130 Gunship is loaded with equipment and weaponry that makes tanks look like toys. They carry 25mm or 40mm Gatling guns and a 105mm cannon, which effectively makes them far superior to a tank with wings.^[1]

9 Videophones

Long before the invention of the television, people imagined a world in which they could engage in a telephone conversation while seeing the person they were speaking to on the other end. Because of this, the technology to do exactly that was developed at great cost for a consumer market that had been imagining videophones for decades.

By the time such a product was made available, it was far too expensive, and few could afford it. The first devices cost $1,500 for a single phone, and the service cost nearly $100 a month, making it unaffordable for consumers and an iffy purchase for companies.

By the turn of the millennium, companies were still working hard to transmit video communications over telephone lines, but the technology was still expensive and difficult to perfect. This ultimately led to an overall abandonment of dedicated videotelephony over phone lines.

In its place came different video teleconferencing means, using data networks and the Internet to make calls. Today, people use apps to communicate, but while the technology is more than available for anyone who wants to use it, most people don’t bother to appear to the person they communicate with, preferring instead to text, email, or make a simple call.

Video calls have been around for a while now, but they’ve hardly managed to change the world. People still do business over voice communications far more than the video alternative, and it’s unlikely that will change.^[2]

8 The Fiske Reading Machine

Bradley Allen Fiske created numerous inventions throughout his life. Of course, not every one of them was as well thought out as his telescopic sight for naval guns. One such invention, the Fiske Reading Machine, sought to change the way the world digested information, but it failed to catch on with the world’s readers.

The idea was to take a small handheld device with a magnifying lens for one eye and a shield masking the other. Text was minituarized using photo-engraving techniques, and printed onto cards measuring roughly six by two inches. This was impossible to read using the naked eye.

Using the device, a person could look through the lens and read everything printed onto the card. The idea was to reduce the need for paper, create a new pocket-sized means of reading, and literally change the way people consumed text.

To demonstrate his invention, he condensed Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad onto 13 cards. He believed he single-handedly revolutionized the publishing industry, but if this is the first time you’ve heard of his invention, you know he didn’t. It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it wasn’t how people wanted to read books, and the Fiske Reading Machine never made it to mass production.^[3]

7 Cryptocurrencies

The world’s first cryptocurrency was the Bitcoin. When it was first created in 2008 (by an unknown person or group), it looked as if it might be a world-changing invention. Cryptocurrencies are forms of digital currency that exist without a central bank or administrator.

They are relatively complex, and they can be “mined” using sophisticated graphics chips that use their processing power to create new blocks in a consistent blockchain. Essentially, they crunch numbers and slowly create new Bitcoins.

In the beginning, Bitcoins weren’t worth very much real-world money, but by 2016, their value shot up to $2,900, and within five years, they peaked in value at $19,511, though that value quickly crashed.

Cryptocurrencies theoretically could change the way people conduct international business. Still, the anonymous nature of mining and spending them has really only benefited criminal organizations.

Even though it is a decentralized monetary system, it’s still susceptible to the same problems as a traditional currency, including counterfeiting, market manipulation, and more. Cryptocurrencies are still around, and there are many more than just Bitcoin. Still, it’s unlikely to change international monetary systems for a myriad of reasons.^[4]

6 Daylight Motion Pictures

When you go to the movies, you find yourself sitting in a large theater, and the only significant source of light is the powerful lamp in the projector. That light is reflected off the screen, and it works best when there are no other sources of light — turning one on would wash out the image, making it harder to see.

Despite this fact, there was a time when people thought it best to watch movies in the daylight out of a need for security. In 1910, that’s exactly what some people tried to do with “daylight motion pictures.” It was a trend that raced around the United States, and it spread like wildfire.

The concept utilized darker screens, brighter and stronger projectors, and the misapprehension that movies needed to be enjoyed in the full light of day. California even passed a law stipulating that movie theaters were required to sufficiently illuminate their theaters so that patrons could see one another.

Of course, the craze didn’t last for very long. Projectionists complained that movies didn’t look good in well-lit rooms. Various other problems caused Daylight Motion Pictures to become a thing of the past, ultimately changing nothing as darkened theaters returned.^[5]

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5 The Helio-Motor

In 1900, Dr. William Calver created a device he called the Helio-Motor, which he believed would revolutionize the energy industry. He was inspired by the legend of Archimedes’ heat ray. He created a device to utilize the sun’s energy to be used in other applications.

He believed he had “solved the use of the sun’s rays,” having created a device that concentrated sunlight using mirrors. They would target that energy onto bricks or water, storing the energy and generating power without using electricity.

The debut of his Helio-Motor was met with excitement, and people lined up to invest in his idea. Leland Stanford (of the university that bears his name) once told Calver, “The steam engine made a great revolution, and this will make another.”

Since nobody has a Helio-Motor running every device in their home, it clearly didn’t revolutionize energy in any way. It wasn’t efficient — far less than other means of generating and storing energy.

While the Helio-Motor never changed the world, the concept has evolved over the years. Present-day systems that use mirrors to reflect sunlight into concentrated solar power plants are viable, though they are far more advanced than what Calver created.^[6]

4 Cinerama

Long before IMAX was a thing, the best way to view a widescreen formatted film was through a process called Cinerama. It was developed by the motion picture industry to counter the growing trend of television. The first time it was used was back in 1952, when the movie, This is Cinerama, was premiered for a crowd of cheering and enthusiastic people on Broadway.

The new format projected the video onto three large, deeply curved screens, making for a massive image. It was touted as the future of movie watching. Still, it never managed to take hold of the marketplace, and it eventually fell into obscurity.

The problem with Cinerama technology, at least initially, was that it required three projectors (and three projectionists) to perfectly synchronize their projection at the exact same time. If that wasn’t achieved, it wouldn’t work correctly, so Cinerama needed a lot of people and money to operate.

Most movie theaters weren’t willing to upgrade due to the cost. By the time digital technology made it possible to link the projectors without the need for multiple people, it was too late. There are still some Cinerama locations in use around the country, but it’s more of a novelty than a viable “world-changing” means of watching movies.^[7]

3 Dymaxion House

In the 1930s, Buckminster Fuller sought to create a new industry and solve the growing need for affordable housing through the invention of the Dymaxion House. The idea was to develop an easily-manufactured home that could be put up quickly and satisfy the needs of as many people as possible.

The homes met that challenge, as they could be delivered via a truck to anywhere in the country and could be set up in only two days. They contained two bedrooms and a bathroom, but their standardized format proved more of a problem than a solution.

It was nearly impossible to find furniture that fit nicely inside a round home, and there was no way to customize them at all. Despite the fact that the relatively inexpensive homes might have solved the growing need for housing following WWII, Fuller felt the design needed improvement.

Instead of letting the prototype be made commercially, he insisted he could make a better design, but this never manifested. As a result, the Dymaxion House remains an architectural oddity that failed to revolutionize housing in post-war America’s expanding suburbs.^[8]

2 Radioactive Products

After radium was discovered in 1898, it wasn’t long before people started putting it into every product imaginable. It was widely believed that the substance was capable of doing everything from growing hair to increasing male virility.

There was a time when radium could be found in everything from lipstick to chocolate, and as we now know, that was a terrible idea. Radium became the early 20th-century buzzword in much the same way people buy things for sporting “Non-GMO” or “Organic” today.

The product was thought to change the world, and it did — just not for the better. Radium was put into butter and so much else, that by 1925, the New York Times ran the headline, “Radium Disease Found; Has Killed 5.”

The newly-dubbed “radium necrosis” was clearly a dangerous problem, and radium quickly flew off the shelves and out of consumers’ reach. The discovery of radium was certainly a world-changing event, but the various products containing it managed only to hurt people.

Radium continued to be used in the marketplace until the 1960s. The last products to feature radium were luminescent timepieces.^[9]

1 Flying Cars

People have been imagining a world filled with flying cars since before automobiles were even invented. Over the years, there have been some legitimate attempts at creating them. Various prototypes were developed in the early 20th century, but they never managed to change the world.

In 1940, Henry Ford said, “Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.” He wasn’t exactly wrong, either. The Aerocar was flying through the skies by the end of the decade. That vehicle never entered production, and neither did any other prototype.

The biggest problem with flying cars has to do with people. Most of us aren’t trained to fly a plane, much less a car with wings or jets that keep it aloft. Because of this, no government has made it legal for a person to fly about the country without serious regulation. The Aerocar, for example, was only able to fly from airports and couldn’t simply take off from a highway.

The dream is still alive for many inventors, and every so often, a new flying car makes headlines around the world. In September 2020, a Japanese country tested a new manned flying car for the first time, and while it hasn’t changed the world, it theoretically could… one day.^[10]

10 Astonishing Feats Of Modern Technology

Many people believe high-tech problems require high-tech solutions. It’s not quite so. Complex technologies sometimes require simple, low-tech solutions that may cost next to nothing.

Cheap here doesn’t mean inferior since these solutions are often better than the more expensive, high-tech solutions. This list is evidence that the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle is sometimes the best way to go. As the principle states, most things work best when they are kept simple.

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10 Ostrich feathers and carmakers

Carmakers put a lot of effort into ensuring your new vehicle rolls out of their factories with a spotless paintjob. That’s why they heavily invest in state of the art equipment like high-tech painting stations, industrial robots and ostrich feathers. Did we just say ostrich feathers? Yes, female ostrich feathers actually.

The smallest dust particle can destroy the best paintjob and no one knows that better than carmakers. This is why they demarcate their painting departments from the main factory. They even blast workers and visitors to the painting departments with air to remove dust and loose fiber that may be hanging on their clothes.

However, that isn’t enough since minute dust particles still find their way in and stick on vehicles awaiting painting. Carmakers get rid of these particles by running the vehicles through giant dusters made out of female ostrich feathers right before painting.^[1]

9 Mirrors and elevators

Early elevators did not have mirrors. Manufacturers only added mirrors because they did not want to invest their time, effort and money into making faster elevators.

It all began several decades ago, at a time when elevators were still a new invention. Users often complained the elevators were too slow. Most elevator manufacturers returned to the drawing board to design faster elevators, which was expensive. However, one company decided to do things a bit differently.

It conducted a research and discovered most users thought elevators were slower than they really were. People only complained because they had nothing to do other than stare at the walls of the elevators while thinking about the many bad things that could happen if the cables snapped and the elevator fell to the ground.

The elevator company concluded they needed a way to distract people. They added mirrors so people could think about their appearance while in elevators. Users instantly lost track of time and now thought elevators were faster than they were.^[2]

8 Angled runways and aircraft carriers

If you’ve seen an overhead photo of a modern aircraft carrier or even seen one up-close, you will notice the runway is always angled and never straight. This contrasts with the World War II era aircraft carriers that had straight runways. Why is this so?

This has everything to do with the invention of the jet engine. World War II era carriers carried propeller-driven airplanes, which required shorter runways to take-off and land. This meant the carriers could launch and recover airplanes simultaneously. However, this changed when jet powered airplanes came along.

Jet engines require longer runways for take-off or landing. This meant the carriers were either launching or recovering airplanes and couldn’t do both at the same time. On top of that, landing jets that missed the arresting wire (which helps in rapidly decelerating a landing airplane) would not have enough runway space to taxi and take-off to attempt another landing.

One solution to these problems was to build larger aircraft carriers with longer runways. This suggestion was cast aside because it did not solve all the aforementioned problems. A second suggestion was to leave landing airplanes hovering above the carrier while other airplanes took off. However, this too was abandoned because jets do not carry enough fuel.

The third option was to tilt the runways on existing carriers to maximize runway space. The angled runways were longer and solved every issue the navy had with shorter airways.^[3]

7 Playstation 3 consoles and supercomputers

A few years ago, the US Air Force used 1,760 Sony Playstation 3 consoles to build the most powerful supercomputer in the US Department of Defense and the 33rd most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The supercomputer was so powerful that it could perform 500 million mathematical operations in one second and analyze over a billion pixels in one minute. The Air Force used it to process high-resolution satellite images, identify unclear objects in space and research into artificial intelligence.

A Playstation 3 cost $400 apiece at the time the air force built the supercomputer while a similar part from a “real computer” cost around $10,000. This put the cost of the entire project at $2 million, which is between 5-10% the price of a regular supercomputer of similar capability.^[4]

6 Xbox 360 controllers and nuclear submarines

A periscope is one of the defining features of a submarine. It’s that tube-like instrument submariners use to see above water while submerged. Periscopes have seen an upgrade of late and have evolved from the traditional tube-like pole with 45-degree mirrors into high-resolution cameras that can see 360 degrees above the submarine.

The US Navy uses these modern periscopes in its latest Virginia-class nuclear powered submarines. However, this high-tech equipment has the most low-tech controls ever, the Xbox 360 controller.

The use of Xbox controllers in US Navy submarines is a recent development. Until a few years ago, the navy controlled its digital periscopes with $38,000 joysticks. It only swapped them for Xbox controllers after junior officers complained the joysticks were huge, heavy and required extensive training.

Xbox 360 controllers on the other hand, cost around $39.95 apiece. They’re light, easy to use and do not require extensive training. They’re also easy to replace since they can be purchased from the nearest game store.^[5]

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5 VELCRO and NASA

The absence of gravity is one of the most obvious problems NASA encountered in the early days of space travel. As we all know, gravity is the reason everything stays on the ground. In a weightless environment like space, anything that isn’t secured to the ground or walls will just keep floating around.

NASA needed a way to keep tools and equipment from floating around without necessarily bolting them to the ground or wall. So it turned to VELCRO, the inventor of hook-and-loop fasteners and both worked together to perfect a hook-and-loop fastener that will not only keep stuff from floating around but will also survive the extreme environment of space.

NASA uses lots of VELCRO in its projects. It even added them to spacesuit helmets so that astronauts can scratch their noses while spacewalking. Little wonder many people erroneously think NASA invented hook-and-loop fasteners. NASA did not invent hook-and-loop fasteners but as it said about VELCRO in 1969, “We couldn’t fly without it”.^[6]

4 Rats and landmines

Landmines are a huge problem in former warzones. Considering they only explode when someone or something steps on them, they can remain active for decades, even long after the war is over. Every year, thousands of people lose their lives after stepping on forgotten landmines.

Finding and deactivating these landmines is a very difficult and dangerous job, even with bomb detection equipment. Some organizations replace the bomb detection equipment with bomb detection dogs but these dogs are often expensive to transport and complicated to use.

In 1997, an anti-landmine NGO called APOPO stepped in with a cheaper and better solution, rats. These aren’t your regular subway rats but the African giant pouched rat, which are as large as cats. The rats have terrible eyesight but excellent sense of smell, which they use to detect the TNT in the landmines.

African giant pouched rats are faster and better than humans and dogs. A rat will cover 2,000 square feet in just 20 minutes. A human equipped with bomb detectors will cover the same distance in four days. The rats are also light enough to walk over landmines without triggering them. APOPO’s rats have detected over 13,200 landmines in several countries so far.^[7]

3 A $10 domain name and WannaCry

A few years ago, the world experienced one of the worst ransomware attacks ever seen. WannaCry as it was called, infected over 300,000 computers in 150 countries. The virus locked owners out of their computers and instructed them to pay hundreds of dollars in Bitcoin as ransom.

WannaCry continued ravaging the world until a man identified as Malwaretech bought a domain name. Domain names are not expensive. They cost around $10 on average. However, that simple action was enough to render WannaCry docile. It instantly stopped spreading and removed itself from every computer it had infected. How did this happen?

This happened because Malwaretech exploited the same thing that made WannaCry successful. Unlike regular viruses, ransomwares always maintain a communication channel that links the attacker to the victim. While this may sound dumb, the attacker actually needs this channel to send payment information to their victims, collect ransoms and unlock their computers after payment.

However, this communication channel works both ways because law enforcement agencies could use it to track the attackers. Attackers counter this by building kill switches into their virus. This allows them to shut down their viruses the moment they suspect they’re being tracked.

For WannaCry, that kill switch was a domain name. The attackers programmed the virus to check the internet for an unregistered domain name at intervals. The virus would continue spreading if the domain remained unregistered but will instantly stop the moment it was registered. Malwaretech found that kill switch and registered the domain name, stopping the virus.^[8]

2 Speed tape and airplanes

We all know airplanes require regular maintenance since pilots cannot park on the nearest cloud whenever they run into issues. However, maintenance is a big word here since it could refer to something as basic as holding the airplane together with speed tape.

Think of speed tape as the duct tape for airplanes. Like duct tape, they can fix everything even though aviation authorities limit them to holding noncritical parts of the airplane together. They’re considered a temporary solution and the fault will be usually sorted out the next time the airplane goes into maintenance.

Speed tape costs a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. While that may seem expensive, it is cheaper when compared to the thousands or even millions of dollars airlines will lose if airplanes were taken out of service every time they have issues.^[9]

1 iPhones and the US Army Special Operations Command

The US Army Special Operations Command uses many specialized mobile apps during top military operations. However, instead of developing expensive devices to handle those apps, they turned to a cheaper alternative, iPhones.

While we do not know what the majority of these apps do, we know of one that uses the split screen feature of the iPhone. The operator sees a live footage shot from a flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on one part of the screen and a map showing the route taken by the UAV on the other.

A Business Insider report revealed the army previously used Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Note smartphones before switching to the iPhone 6s. The switch was necessary because the apps often froze on Samsung, constantly requiring the operators to restart the device. On top of that, the iPhone 6s also had better screen resolution, which made photos and videos sharper.

Before this turns into another Samsung-iPhone, Android-iOS or Google-Apple war, we should add that the Department of Defense pitched the older Samsung phones it was using at the time against the newer iPhone 6s during tests.^[10]

10 Pieces Of Technology That Won’t Exist In 20 Years

Many of us adore the rich and famous tech CEOs around today. However, the reality is very different for those on the inside. By inside, we mean those who work for them. They know the bad and the ugly sides of these CEOs, which are the two sides we on the outside do not get to see very often. We only see the good.

This is not to say all tech CEOs are nasty. The truth is far from that. Some are but most are not. However, most have insanely high standards and it can quickly become a problem when their employees fall short of their expectations.

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10 Jeff Bezos

 

Jeff Bezos has a very high standard he expects every Amazon employee to meet every single time. Amazon insiders will tell you that if Bezos ever forwards an email to you, you had better find a solution to it, or else you may find yourself in deep trouble.

There are actually many ways to piss Bezos off. However, whichever one you use, be rest assured he would fall into what his employees call “nutters”, which involves him screaming and saying some unkind things to you.^[1]

Jeff Bezos often ridicules his employees by asking or making suggestive questions and statements. He has asked people questions like “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”, “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?” and “Why are you wasting my life?”

On other occasions, he has told people, “We need to apply some human intelligence to this problem” and “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B team document”.^[2]

9 Elon Musk

 
In a recent article, we talked about how Tesla employees avoid passing in front of Elon Musk’s desk because he could fire them for no reason. However, it appears that we may have underestimated how vicious Elon Musk could be. People familiar with the CEO have described him as a “destructive but highly localized tornado” that causes problems for everyone.

Elon Musk is notoriously infamous among Tesla employees for his fondness for changing their jobs without notice.^[3] Things are no better for SpaceX employees who are used to his quirks and lack of emotions. He once yelled at several executives before a party, right in front of their spouses, because someone was lagging behind on a part of a future rocket.

Steve Davis, who was one of SpaceX’s best employees, experienced Elon Musk’s lack of emotions firsthand when he helped develop a part that cost $120,000 from third-party contractors for $3,900. He sent an enthusiastic email to Elon Musk detailing what he considered his greatest achievement at SpaceX. Elon Musk replied him with the two-letter word, OK.^[4]

8 Steve Jobs

 

Steve Jobs was infamous for insulting, harassing and intimidating his employees. He was harsh, quick to lose his temper and would publicly scold anyone the moment they stepped out of line. Several top executives like Rob Johnson (who created Apple’s stores) and Alison Johnson (a one-time vice-president) even left Apple because they could not tolerate being around him.

Steve Jobs had a thing for rules, which he expected everyone to follow the letter. Anyone who attempted to break the rules or do something different was fired on the spot without questions. This, you will all agree, is contradictory for someone who always parked in spaces reserved for the physically challenged.

Steve Jobs also had a thing against clarifying himself. He believed everyone should understand whatever he said without asking for further explanation. Jobs ridiculed employees who defaulted on this unwritten rule. He would often raise concerns about their intelligence or even out rightly fire them instead of clarifying himself.^[5]

7 Evan Spiegel

 

Evan Spiegel is the CEO of Snap Inc., which owns Snapchat. Employees say he runs Snap like a dictator, leading to a “toxic” and “cut-throat” work culture they compared to “swimming in a shark tank”.

For starters, Evan is too secretive and never listens to advice. He is also fond of making employees do work they are untrained for, before turning around to fire them for being incompetent. Employees also accuse Evan of operating a system of favoritism, which encourages them to engage in office politics to earn his trust and become a member of his inner circle.

Unfortunately, not everyone works this way. Many top Snap executives have even resigned because they could not cope with the CEO. Fortunately, it appears Evan knows he has leadership issues and may be working on improving himself. He once engaged a management coach and conducted a survey where he asked employees for ideas on how he could be a better CEO.^[6]

6 Jia Yueting

 

You have probably never heard of Jia Yueting. He is the former CEO and now, Chairman of Faraday Future, a battery electric vehicle maker that was once considered the main challenger to Tesla. However, Faraday Future never lived up to its name and its future is literally hanging in the balance.

Current and former employees agree the company failed because the CEO and his lieutenants are clueless and directionless. Jia himself has been singled out for his lack of vision. For example, he calls Faraday Future an internet company even though he is trying to build a car.

Employees describe Faraday Future as a “toxic” and “chaotic” place where abusive managers rush through major tasks, force workers to remain at work until nine in the night and stop them from pointing out obvious defects in the company’s product. Little wonder the company ended up with a 1.9 (out of five) stars on the popular job review site, Glassdoor.^[7]

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5 Larry Ellison

 

If you think most of the CEO’s on this list are annoying to work with, wait until you meet Larry Ellison, the former CEO, current Chairman and co-founder of Oracle. Ellison is infamous for publicly ridiculing his business partners and rivals.

Unsurprisingly, he is no better with his employees especially his top executives, who are always at the receiving end of his eccentric behavior. For instance, he was fond of arriving late to meetings. By late, we mean he arrived an hour and thirty minutes behind schedule. Another executive even nicknamed him “The late Larry Ellison” because of his habitual lateness.

Ellison was also fond of firing his top executives just before they became eligible to receive the stock options stated in their contracts. This made a journalist compare him to a juicer that extracts the juice out of people before dumping them.

If you think Ellison could not go lower, wait until you hear that he also fired top executives the moment they became powerful and influential enough to replace him. One peculiar case was Ray Lane who once saved Oracle from bankruptcy. Ellison fired Ray because Ray was beginning to attract the attention of Oracle’s shareholders.^[8]

4 Tim Armstrong

 

Tim Armstrong of AOL is another CEO renowned for his ruthlessness. A former employee described him as a “robotic and possibly sociopathic manager” who will fire you while smiling. According to the employee, Tim fires on impulse and liked announcing the details of his latest layoffs in internal memos. He also has a fondness for publicly ridiculing his workers for minor infractions.

In one notorious incident, he fired a man for taking his photo during a conference. Tim repeatedly shouted at the man and ordered him out of the hall in the presence of his colleagues. Later during the same conference, he went on to ridicule two female employees for giving birth to sick babies. He claimed their hospital bills cost the company $2 million.^[9]

3 Mark Pincus

 

Mark Pincus is the former CEO, current Chairman and co-founder of the internet gaming company, Zynga. Employees have described him as a “controlling” and “fearsome” person who created a not-so-ideal workplace at the time he was CEO. Pincus is probably aware of this too, which was why he hired a consultant to help him with what he called “emergency likability intervention”.

However, he may have also been unbothered about whatever effect his management style had on his workers. While talking about his former job as a management consultant back in 2010, he said, “I went out of my way to tell people they were stupid if I thought they were”. He then added, “People loved me or hated me”. It appeared he wanted replicate the same thing at Zynga.

Pincus first hit infamy in 2010 when he forced employees to hand over their stock just before Zynga went public. He later returned a fraction of the stock. However, what he gave back was so small that his employees considered it “an insult”.

Pincus “reign of terror”, as his employees called it, ended in 2013 when shareholders elevated him to the post of Chairman in an attempt to disengage him from actively running Zynga. People were so glad about the news that the company stock appreciated right after it was announced.^[10]

2 Tom Rutledge

 

Tom Rutledge is not a big name in the tech world. He was the third highest paid executive in the United States in 2019 after Elon Musk and Tim Cook. That year, he received $116.9 million in salary, bonus and stock as the CEO of Charter Communications, which trades as Spectrum.^[11]

Rutledge has always managed to stay under the radar and would not have made this list if he had not caused the longest strike in the United States.

Rutledge laid the groundwork for the strike in 2016 when he bought Time Warner Cable and renamed it Spectrum. He then went on to change the contract Spectrum’s 1,800 cable technicians had with their former employer. However, the technicians got enough and went on strike in March 2017 after he modified their health and retirement benefits.

Rather than negotiate with the striking workers, Rutledge hired temporary workers to do their jobs. The strike has become so drawn-out that around half of the employees have returned to work even though their demands are unmet. Meanwhile, others have stuck to their guns and taken on low-paying jobs like driving for Uber.^[12]

1 Elizabeth Holmes

 

Rounding up this list is Elizabeth Holmes, the former youngest self-made female billionaire who is currently worth $0. Her downfall is tied to the failure of her tech company, Theranos, which she claimed was going to build a machine that can detect series of health problems from a pinprick of blood taken from the finger.

Former employees say Holmes ran Theranos like her personal empire. She expected them to work 16 hours a day, every day of the week, just as she did.^[13] She even shifted dinnertime to 8 pm just to keep them at work while her boyfriend and Chief Operating Officer, Ramesh Balwani closely monitored the time everyone signed in and out.

Holmes and Balwani were also ridiculously secretive and controlling, giving rise to a toxic and distrustful work culture. However, this was not enough to stop Holmes from extending her madness to visitors, who were required to sign non-disclosure agreements before entering the facility. Security guards followed them around throughout their stay, even when they went to the bathroom.

Holmes downfall began in 2015 when reporter, John Carreyrou, revealed her supposed machine did not work. Holmes initially denied this but her sham was soon exposed. She was charged with fraud and forced to close Theranos. Meanwhile, analysts have reviewed her $4.5 billion wealth, which was based on her stock of the now-failed Theranos, down to zero.^[14]

10 Pieces Of Technology That Won’t Exist In 20 Years

Information technology or IT remains one of the most versatile, fast-growing fields, and research shows that being skilled in high demand tech boosts compensation. If you’re looking to shift or advance in your career with new tech certifications and expertise, consider mastering the following tech skills. 

Employers are headhunting for the latest, in-demand skills. Tech has taken on more varied and significant roles in day-to-day business operations and there are valuable opportunities you can use in the workforce. Impress your boss by mastering the right combination of practical expertise, technical experience, and software skills.

10 Cybersecurity

Before the fourth quarter of 2020, there were at least 2,935 security breaches publicly reported, making it the worst year yet recorded in terms of cybersecurity. To circumvent further intrusions, executives have increased budgets for cyberspace security in 2021 by at least 55%, while others are seeking to hire extra full-time security specialists.

But where do you specialize your tech mastering efforts in the wide tiered online security niche? While every discipline in cybersecurity, cloud security, and application development security are impressive, cloud security and app integrity are projected to grow by 115% and 164%. The most wanted skills for app development include app security code review, secure container, and micro-services security.

DevSecOps is a big winner here, earning premiums that equal 19% of your base pay, and you’ll be integrating app security into the cycle of development. Cloud security specialists can delve into Google cloud security, Azure security, public cloud security, cloud security architecture, and infrastructure. 

Beyond 2021, cybersecurity certifications will remain formidable, garner premium salaries, and buck the overall trend. Many IT employers offer a base salary bump for these Credentials:

• CEH or Certified Ethical Hacker
• CCSP or Certified Cloud Security Professional
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP
• Advanced Security Practitioner from CompTIA

9 Full Stack Development

Although not a new skill in the tech space, developers are always in demand, particularly front-end, back-end, and full-stack professionals with top-notch coding skills.

Indeed’s ranking of best tech skills for 2020 showed that full-stack software development ranks 2nd while also being in the top growth ranks with a rate of 161.9%. Full-stack engineer’s hiring rates have been growing steadily in the US since 2005 at about 35% per year. These coding skills are in-demand around the world right now:

• JavaScript
• Python
• Go
• Swift
• React
• Angular
• Spring
• Django

JavaScript and its many coding variances continue to lead the pack as the most used programming language, while Go is in high demand due to a lack of developers who’ve mastered it. Angular and React top the list for valuable front-end development skills while spring and Django are in-demand for back-end frameworks.

8 Blockchain

Despite the unprecedented decline of cryptocurrencies in the last year, blockchain remains relevant for crowdfunding, identity management, peer-to-peer payment platforms, digital voting, and file storage.

With such versatility, many employers are seeking developers that have mastered blockchain for building decentralized apps and smart contracts. The most sought-after blockchain skills include database design, networking, and all the applicable programming languages like JavaScript, Java, Solidity, Python, Go, and C++.  

Blockchain engineers are commanding similar salaries as those paid to Machine Learning specialists, currently an average of $162,000. Blockchain is being used by financial institutions and major banks, while tech giants like Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon are developing blockchain services.

7 Cloud Computing

As more and more enterprises switch from traditional physical server infrastructures to cloud-based solutions, cloud computing skills are becoming highly marketable. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligent services are now hosted by cloud platforms, and job openings between 2017 and 2020 have increased by 107% in the US alone.

The leading cloud-based service provider is AWS or Amazon Web Services, and gaining skills in this tech will improve your demand as a professional. Being certified in AWS will see you earn more than your non-qualified colleagues, as cloud computing skills will earn you an average of $130,272.

AWS cloud solution architects have the highest US and Canada tech certifications, while other cloud computing skills include DevOps, Microsoft, Kubernetes, Docker, and Azure. Cloud engineering has long term demand in the tech sector as more IT solutions are being shifted to cloud-based platforms.

6 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI or artificial intelligence, and its counterpart ML (or machine learning) are buzzwords synonymous with an increasingly innovative business environment. A significant number of tools and services are today based on ML and AI, and the hiring rate for artificial intelligence specialists has grown by 74% in the past couple of years.

A 2019 study of the best tech jobs by Indeed found that Machine learning engineers openings had increased by 344% for the past 4 years. These ML and AI specialists with skills such as python, natural language processing, java, TensorFlow, and R command an average salary of up to $140,000 annually in the US.

Mastering these tech skills will including building Chatbots, one of the most wanted specializations under ML and AI. Several major organizations are relying on AI operated customer service interactions for website queries, and being a master earns you the highest IT salaries in 2021 and beyond.  As an AI specialist, you’ll benefit from accessing a wide variety of tech jobs for your portfolio, including data sciences, product management, and software engineering.

Machine learning covers statistical pattern recognition, neural networks, unsupervised learning, deep learning, recommender systems, and anomaly detection.

5 Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality

The collaboration of Augmented Reality (AR )and Virtual Reality (VR); called Extended Reality (XR) and many industries are adopting XR tech, including education, manufacturing, entertainment, advertising, and health. Software specialists in this tech segment are bound to be in very high demand and the growth rate for hiring VR/AR engineers has increased to 1400%.

While the full impact of XR technology is to get seen in the next couple of years, there is a need for additional specialists who’ve mastered this tech. Expert projection placed the market size for AR/VR at $6.1 billion by 2017 but increased to a whopping $215 billion in 2021.

XR is being used by top enterprises like NVIDIA, Facebook, Google, HTV, and Snapchat, companies that have seen unprecedented growth as a result of the pandemic. There is also a scarcity of XR quality assurance specialists that can troubleshoot algorithms and make sense of the output for use by other tech departments.

4 Analytics and Data Science

Data analytics and data science are two highly sought after tech skills that are consistently hand-in-hand with big data, whose revenues are now projected to grow by 14.1% in 2026. Big data initiatives and advanced analytics are being launched by 84% of tech enterprises to create greater accuracy and accelerate decision-making processes.

According to LinkedIn’s report on emerging jobs, data science emerges at the top for the last three years. While the two tech careers are closely related, analysis is an entry-level tech skill. On the other hand, data science becomes more advanced.  

Industries that require data specialists include finance, software development, health, education, and e-retail. Data scientists command an average salary of $101,000 and get voted as having the third-best jobs in the US by Glassdoor’s annual Best Jobs in America report.

Data analysis and science specialists help drive better decision making by providing an overview of the organization, analysis, and interpretation of big data. On mastering this tech skill, you’ll be able to build projects with an understanding of neural networks, classifiers, and ML algorithms.

3 IoT or Internet of Things and Big Data

Internet of Things (IoT) is a broad term. It covers everything that’s connected to the internet and, more specifically, devices that communicate with each other. Defined as objects that talk, IoT (or edge computing) includes smartphones, wearable tech, and other smart sensors.

One of the major concerns with connected devices is data security, and that’s why techies who’ve mastered IoT tech are taught after. The average salary of an Internet of Things professional is $101,000, with the segment poised to become the next technology career boom.

By 2025, IoT will impact the economy by up to $11 trillion according to predictions by the McKinsey Global Institute. Currently, 94% of business is investing in IoT preparedness initiatives, and mastering this tech requires you to identify solutions and network components with security risks and data management for prototype production.

2 Robotics

Robotics covers hardware and software engineering, which means you’ll be working with physical and virtual bots. Robotics encompasses specializations like automated manufacturing, exploration robots, medical equipment, and entertainment animatronics. Automated tasks like virtual assistance and customer care use software that acts as virtual bots.

According to LinkedIn, the robotics industry, comprising both virtual and physical bots has grown by 40% every year, emerging as a part of the $1.2 trillion AI sector. Coupled with AI certification, you can earn a salary of up to $181,430.

As a robotic engineer, you’ll be able to operate and adjust robotic real-world functions such as moving across terrains in disaster recovery or healthcare. Mastering this tech skill means that you can program a physical or virtual robot to provide movement or flight solutions using languages like SQL, python, visual basic, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

To qualify as an RPA or robotics process automation engineer, you’ll need diverse technical skills for development, architecture, and analysis for providing solutions. You should be well-versed in Microsoft .NET Framework for building RPA platforms coupled with experience in business processes, communication, and process mapping.

1 User Experience and User Interface Designer

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) belong to the same family of tech skills. But there are fundamental differences. Masters in UI have skills to design user interfaces for apps and websites, making them more appealing, easy to navigate, and free-flowing.

For a UX specialist, a lot of testing and research gets performed for an elemental consideration of how the users interact with a website or company app. This expert coordinates with UI designers and web or app developers and has the type of career where analytics meets creativity. UI designers focus on layout, visuals, and the general feel and appearance of a page of a virtual product, while UX professionals use testing and analysis to meet their client’s needs.

According to Adobe, 87% of managers disclosed that their organization’s number one priority is to hire more UX specialists, and there are more than 14,000 job openings in the US alone. Mastering skills as UI/UX designers require that you’re proficient with design tools and platforms like AI, VR/AR, and wearables.

Hands up, who’s got a smartphone? All 2.71 billion of you. Now keep your hands up if you know a) how it was made, b) how it gets disposed of when you’re on to your next one, and c) what it does to your health and freedom in the meantime. 

That probably only five people still have their hand up is by no means an accident; it’s good for business. Because if you had known you probably wouldn’t have got one in the first place. You certainly wouldn’t want to keep the one you have — although, for reasons we’ll get into, it may be too late for you now.

From utterly horrifying to utterly, utterly, disgustingly horrifying, here are 10 things Big Tech would rather keep a secret.

10. Smartphones are designed to fail

Although smartphones could easily last more than three years, most people dispose of them sooner. Why? It’s not, as it should be, for all the reasons here, but because of planned obsolescence. This is a business strategy comprising various techniques to ensure there’s always demand for new phones. 

These techniques include high repair costs (e.g. for screens) versus buying a new device, the scarcity of genuine parts, short warranties, and clever marketing. All of these approaches are coercive more than anything. But planned obsolescence more specifically refers to failures built into the software or hardware of your (their) device. Apple, for example, has been accused of deliberately slowing down iPhones with an “update”. They deny it, of course, but have nevertheless agreed to settle with its customers (products) for $25 per device.

9. Your smartphone diminishes your quality of life

There are two ways to use a smartphone — consciously (what researchers call the ‘Aware’ mode) and unconsciously (the ‘Unaware’ mode). Most of us will immediately recognize the difference as that between us using the technology and the technology using us. Unsurprisingly, high levels of smartphone use in the Unaware mode have been linked to diminished quality of life (measured in positive feeling, competence, and functioning).

What’s worrying about this is that smartphones aren’t a habit afflicting just a few, like smoking. It’s total. Hence the concerns for generations raised in a world where smartphones have always existed. ‘Generation Z’, for example, or ‘iGen’, differs starkly from its predecessors, the ‘Millennials’ — more starkly than Millennials from ‘Generation X’ and than any other generation has from its own predecessor.

One key difference is in how they spend their time. Since the release of the iPhone in 2007, teenagers are reportedly spending less time hanging out with friends, dating, having sex, or even sleeping — and more time feeling lonely. Instead of meeting up, teenagers tend to inhabit virtual spaces online — apps and websites. And it’s not making them happy. According to the Monitoring the Future survey, those who spend more time looking at their smartphones, and social media, are far more likely to be unhappy with their lives.

8. Smartphone apps are intentionally addictive

How many times a day do you check your smartphone? In typical addict fashion, even heavy users probably underestimate it; the average for Americans is 262 times per day. What is our fascination with these little black mirrors?

Well the truth is it’s not our fault, or even our choice. Smartphones are addictive by design. According to app developer Peter Mezyk, “the success of an app is often measured by the extent to which it introduces a new habit.” Why? Because attention pays. The more time our focus languishes on social media and other apps, the more ad revenue their creators rake in. Your mind is the product, not the customer. Former employees of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others have placed this beyond any doubt. 

In fact, there’s now an industry standard for encouraging addiction. It’s based on a model devised by Stanford psychology professor B.J. Fogg, and works by generating a stimulus around negative emotions such as boredom or loneliness. 

7. “Your” smartphone is a surveillance device

Edward Snowden famously risked his life to reveal how closely the US and other governments monitor their citizens. It’s part of the reason why VPNs are, for some of us at least, the new normal. But we still carry the snoops in our pockets. Thanks to virtually untraceable spyware, all governments now have the ability to access our smartphones without our knowledge. And it’s an ability they exploit.

It’s not just America. The Polish government has gathered data from dissenting journalists’ phones for use in smear campaigns against them; the Hungarian government has deployed spyware to monitor NGOs; Greece has used it to cover up corruption; the Spanish have used it to monitor individuals involved with the Catalan independence movement… The list goes on. And it’s hardly surprising. 

What is surprising is the ignorance of smartphone surveillance capabilities even among those most at risk. Protestors, for example, continue to carry their personal tracking devices — allowing police to identify and track them with ease.

6. Checking your smartphone ruins your eyesight and skin

Most smartphone users don’t care about their eyesight; either that or they don’t know the risks. According to the Vision Council, 80% of Americans look at their devices for more than two hours per day — and 59% have digital eye strain. Worryingly, this damage to retinal cells can lead to age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, eye cancer, and growths on the whites of the eyes. Making matters worse is people tend to blink less when looking at screens. You’ve probably felt your eyes drying out and the headaches that result.

If you think you’ve got youth on your side, beware: the opposite is true. Children’s eyes actually absorb more blue light, placing them at greater risk of diseases.

But it’s not just the eyes. High levels of artificial light also stress the skin — both indirectly, by upsetting sleep patterns, and directly, by oxidative stress. Studies have revealed that exposure to short-wavelength visible light (such as blue light), even for short periods of time, can generate cell-destabilizing molecules (reactive oxygen species) and consequently the early death of skin cells. The result is accelerated aging and wrinkles. But there is a silver lining: Given the concurrent damage to your eyesight, it may be less visible in selfies.

5. Smartphones cause debilitating mental illness

The most obvious and widespread mental harm associated with smartphone use is the stress of being constantly networked. Users feel compelled to respond to every message they get, when they get it, so as to maintain this connection. Studies show us what we already feel numerous times each day: that notifications activate the sympathetic nervous system, releasing adrenaline that in turn increases the heart rate and muscle tension. It takes 30 minutes for the body to stabilize again, and this is 30 minutes many of us never get. 

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Other chronic problems include sleep disruption, cyberbullying, emotional dysregulation, depression, anxiety, impaired cognitive function, low self-esteem and social avoidance.

We don’t need studies to tell us these things, but surveys of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders between 1991 and 2016 show that adolescents spending less time on electronic communication were happier.

4. Smartphones are physically hurting you

We’ve already mentioned how blue light can be damaging to the eyes and skin. It gets worse. By disrupting your circadian rhythm and diminishing sleep quality, it can also contribute to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The manual labvor involved in using a smartphone (unnatural repetitive hand and neck movements) could also lead to trapeziometacarpal osteoarthritis and neck strain. In fact, the force of strain on the neck is 40 pounds at a 30-degree tilt and 60 pounds at 60 degrees — the equivalent of having a child sitting on the back of your neck every time you look down at your phone.

But it’s not just the blue light; it’s also the exposure to radiofrequency-modulated electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs). Spending just 50 minutes on a cell phone call has been found to increase brain glucose metabolism in the region of the brain closest to the antenna. And while it’s not clear what harms this might cause (including to young people’s developing brains), RF-EMF emissions are linked to cancer, and phone use to increased risk of brain tumors. Even on a day-to-day basis, since RF-EMF frequencies sometimes correspond to those in neuronal tissue, it’s feared they could interfere with cognition. Even tiny interferences could have a butterfly effect. It has also been shown that EMFs can penetrate cells and interact with mitochondrial DNA, ultimately destroying through oxidative stress. At the very least, it could lead to electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

And while it’s easy to forget while looking at your smartphone, we still share this world with other creatures — many of whom have been negatively affected by the spike in EMF radiation. There’s heaps of evidence for harms caused to ants, birds, frogs, bees, rodents, plants, and other wildlife. Bees, for example, when exposed to cell phone EMFs for just 10 minutes per day for ten days, don’t return to their hives. This is because they rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

3. Smartphones are assembled in sweatshops

Workers’ (and human) rights abuses at FOXCONN in China, where Apple and Sony get their phones made, are relatively well known — and entirely unresolved. Workers are still paid less than they need to get by, even on overtime hours (which are often not paid as a punishment for not meeting quotas). They’re also exposed to toxins without protection and lied to and abused by their managers (who, for example, have promised double pay to ramp up production but only paid standard in the end). If they want to resign, they have to ask permission, and permission is often denied. They are, in other words, slaves. So it’s no wonder suicide is common there.

But it’s not just FOXCONN or Apple or Sony. All smartphones rely on cheap labor. Another example is Samsung’s sweatshops in Vietnam, where among the mostly female workforce miscarriages are a routine and expected occurrence. Most of their time, even while pregnant, is spent standing causing dizziness and fainting. The toxic fumes don’t help, or the haphazard mix of day-shifts and nights. Even “free time” is painful, since factory dormitories intentionally keep mothers separate from their families.

2. Children die mining cobalt for batteries

More than half the world’s cobalt supply, which smartphone manufacturers depend on for the batteries, comes from hand-dug mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Euphemistically known as ‘artisanal mines’ (ASM), these places are hell on earth.

The true extent of the horror isn’t clear because most of it gets covered up. But what we do know paints a chilling picture. Tens of thousands of children as young as seven years old, all on less than $2 per day, work up to 12 hours a day carrying heavy loads, breathing toxic dust, and contracting skin diseases underground. Accidents are common, resulting in loss of limbs and life, with many bodies left buried in the rubble.

And while the big brands claim to be against child labor, the truth is they’d be smaller without it. So it’s no surprise that, according to Amnesty, they’re not even investigating suppliers. After all, since few smartphone users in the developed world really care, there’s very little pressure to do so. The problem is now so entrenched that “ethical” smartphone alternatives like Fairphone find it impossible to separate ASM-supplied cobalt from other sources. 

1. Smartphones are ravaging the planet

Although your smartphone activity might feel relatively carbon neutral — at least between charges from a power outlet — the data centers required to process all the information involved consume masses of energy. Phone towers too. In the US alone, 4G uses 31 million megawatt-hours of electricity per year, which is enough to power 2.6 million households. 5G is expected to use triple this amount. 

Beyond this, there’s the even bigger impact of manufacture and especially mining. Mining (not just for cobalt but for all the materials invovled, including gold and silver) accounts for as much as 95% of your smartphone’s total carbon footprint during its lifetime… which isn’t very long.

Once you’re done with it, it continues to wreak havoc on the planet. Discarded electronics (or ‘e-waste’) reached a mass of 43 million tons in 2016 alone — equivalent to 4,500 Eiffel Towers. But it’s out of sight, out of mind for most Americans. The hellscapes of e-waste dumps are far away in the developing world, in China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries where regulations are lacking.

Around a century ago, the world’s technology was far different from now. Even the most intelligent scientist would have thought the notion of the internet sounded like crazy witchcraft at the time. Automobiles for the ordinary citizen were just becoming widespread, the television had yet to be created, and the internet had yet to be invented. But, despite all the breakthroughs we’ve seen in technology and all the ways it’s improved our lives, it’s far from perfect. Every day, technology fails, and there have been some spectacular failures in recent memory.

Here are ten recent techs fails and disasters that I’m sure the creators should have rethought.

Related: Ordinary Items That Made People Rich

10 Juicero

What is it that fashionable, hip, aggressive go-getters like above all else? You would have your finger on the pulse if you guessed juice and/or useless devices. The worldwide juice business is approaching $200 billion annually. So, yeah, we like our juice. The annual revenue from kitchen gadgets is over $17.6 billion. Putting them together is a match made in heaven! Or, at the very least, it should have been.

Juicero seemed to be a fantastic idea in 2017. To prepare excellent juice, you need a sophisticated kitchen device, right? How it worked: Individual fruit packets were pressed in an internet-connected machine sponsored by some big-name investors’ $120 million investment.

The machine worked like a vise, squeezing pre-made vegetable and fruit packages with four tons of force to produce delicious and healthy fresh juice. Then someone discovered you could simply tweak the packets by hand, eliminating the need for the $699 juice press. When reporters put it to the test, they found that they could obtain just as much juice and do it quicker if they did it barehanded.

Even after lowering the price to $400, the Juicero had already had a disastrous debut. They went bankrupt after just a few months in business.^[1]

9 Zillow’s AI

Zillow is a real estate firm that has received much attention in recent years due to its market domination. Unfortunately, they spent so much of 2021 grabbing up homes that they had to put a stop to it for a few months. They’d experienced a major technical failure due to a combination of overconfidence and—probably—stupidity.

Most consumers had no idea Zillow really purchased and sold properties, mistaking it for a place where real estate brokers could simply display their listings. The fact was that the corporation was in the business of flipping houses and had built A.I. technologies to help them do so. They were so confident in the A.I. that they allowed it to make cash bids on homes. That proved to be a horrible decision.

By November, the firm—as Zillow Offers—had a backlog of 7,000 properties worth $2.8 billion that needed to be sold. As a consequence of its sloppy spending, they were forced to shut down its A.I. algorithm and cease property purchases, illustrating once and for all that you can’t let a website invest in real estate across a whole nation.^[2]

8 Tesla Bot

Tesla is one of the most well-known firms today. With Elon Musk’s shenanigans in the headlines all the time, the firm can’t help but be mentioned regularly as well, and not only about his antics. Don’t forget that Tesla is still the market leader in electric vehicles. They regularly release new and innovative products to keep their name on everyone’s lips.

In August 2021, Tesla held a press conference to announce that they were developing a humanoid robot. According to Musk, the objective was to construct a machine capable of doing people’s dull, risky, or repetitive activities. So far, everything has gone well. The rollout was the issue.

For whatever reason, Musk opted to show off the concept of the robot before anybody had built one. So instead, they sent out a guy dressed as a robot in a spandex jumpsuit. Then he danced, and it was a disaster.

It didn’t matter whether it was intended as a joke or not. The next day, the corporation was slammed in the press. Many observers chalked it up to a publicity gimmick to divert attention away from poor headlines, but whatever the underlying purpose, it made one of the world’s largest corporations and one of the world’s wealthiest individuals appear silly.^[3]

7 The Freedom Phone

A segment of the American population sees everything unpleasant or scary as a direct assault on their freedom. And their retaliation is to start labeling anything that supports their point of view “freedom” in a random and illogical manner. Remember when someone attempted to call French fries “freedom fries” because of France’s opposition to the Iraq War? Anyway…

In more recent history, the Freedom Phone was created for MAGA supporters who wanted to break free from “Big Tech’s” control by using a smartphone that didn’t censor them or promote a leftist ideology. It would feature an uncensored app store and an anti-surveillance operating system. And, sure, that’s fine if that’s your politics. It’s profitable to appeal to individuals depending on their political convictions. The issue was that the phone’s politics were not in line with its own.

To begin with, the Freedom Phone was nothing more than a rebranded, low-cost Chinese phone. The $499 Freedom Phone turned out to be a $119 Umidigi A9. Umidigi is a name you’ve probably never heard of. And neither had anybody else. So it wasn’t produced in America.

The concept that it was free of monitoring and restriction since it came from China, where neither of those qualities is highly prized, turned out to be a bit of a joke. There were no specifications on the website for purchasers. The OS was swapped with one produced by the Big Tech giants. Their unregulated app store poses serious privacy problems, and practically every tech website has recommended consumers avoid this item like the plague. Also, the phone would still use American cell networks for service.^[4]

6 Quibi

What do you have to say about Quibi? This is possibly the most powerful bomb of 2021, a reality only softened by the fact that everyone but those directly engaged appeared to see it coming from a mile away.

Quibi seemed to be a fusion of conventional TV and movies with something more fast-paced and consumable, such as YouTube and TikTok. The shows were all going to be brief, like five minutes or less, so you could watch them during your morning commute, and they were going to star Kevin Hart, Anna Kendrick, Sam Raimi, Idris Elba, and a slew of other famous names in Hollywood. How did so many well-known people show up? It’s possible that the approximately $2 billion in investment funds had something to do with it.

Quibi survived approximately seven months. There was no-one on board. Only a mobile phone could be used to view Quibi. It was impossible to screencap Quibi shows. It was way too pricey for what it was, and, more significantly, almost everything they produced was mediocre at best. Nearly every program on the platform was unanimously criticized by critics and spectators alike.^[5]

5 Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most anticipated games in recent years when it was launched at the end of 2020. For God’s sake, it even included Keanu Reeves. It was also one of the fastest-selling games of all time, with almost five million pre-orders and 13.7 million copies sold overall. Isn’t that a big victory? Well, not quite.

Because the game was so unstable that it was practically unplayable, it issued refunds to over 30,000 customers. The game was eventually deleted from the PlayStation Store.

On both the PS4 and Xbox One, the game was incredibly buggy. Lawsuits were brought when hackers acquired information from the developer for making the games run poorly on previous-generation platforms.

Even when folks were able to enjoy the game and have it operate flawlessly, the game ended up being barely acceptable in the end. It’s all right. It never lived up to the anticipation, and since its debut, many people have largely forgotten about it.^[6]

4 Coolest Cooler

It takes a lot of effort to turn a cooler into a tech flop. A cooler can’t be that hard to sell, even one as simple as a styrofoam box, so a corporation has to go above and beyond to make it a failure, let alone one that was teeming with technology. But that’s precisely what the Coolest Cooler accomplished when it first appeared a few years ago.

The Coolest Cooler was one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever in 2014, raising a staggering $13 million, which no one could have predicted. Who’d have guessed that coolers were so popular?

The Coolest Cooler was designed to be able to charge electronics such as your phone and have its own blender and Bluetooth speaker, among other features. By 2019, the corporation had filed for bankruptcy, and the cooler had finally gone up in flames.

The CEO blamed Chinese tariffs for the device’s demise. However, product evaluations from 2016 had previously shown that the cooler was mainly useless. With a price tag of $399, you’d think a high-tech cooler would at least operate properly, but this one didn’t. The blender was subpar at best, with a battery life of just around four minutes of blending time.

The cooler was never issued because the firm ran out of money during the Kickstarter campaign. Therefore backers who still wanted one had to pay an extra $96. Additionally, folks who did not fund the Kickstarter and instead purchased one on Amazon received theirs sooner.^[7]

3 Galaxy Fold

The notion of folding technology has intrigued us for a few years in science fiction. Phones and tablets that can be rolled up and bent seem practical since many of us have dropped or crushed phones and shattered the displays, making this a desired feature. As a result, Samsung moved ahead and created a screen that could not be rolled but folded. Or at least that was the plan.

In 2019, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Fold, which resembled a wallet. You could fold it in half and unfold it, and your screen would be right there, giving you double the screen capacity of the size in your pocket. This fantastic technology costs just under $2,000 to purchase. Things did not go as planned.

When Samsung finally allowed reviewers to use the phones, they failed miserably. Most reviews merely needed a day or two to point out that their folding displays didn’t function. Some units produced bulges, while others only operated on one side of the Fold. Other reviews said they removed a protective layer since they didn’t know not to, thereby destroying the phone.

Samsung claimed to have sold one million copies in around four months after the phone’s debut but swiftly backtracked, claiming the one million was what they wanted to sell. Later, Samsung’s CEO humiliatingly recognized that the Fold was released too soon.^[8]

2 Breached Sex Toys

Everyone understands that hackers are lurking around every corner and must secure anything that connects to the internet. We all have a slew of passwords to safeguard everything we possess. For a good reason: hackers can get into almost everything. And sex toys are included in this category as well.

In a strong and expanding industry, some adult toys can be linked to the internet to enable remote control by other users for reasons you may imagine. The issue is that few of these gadgets have any security built-in.

Any personal data acquired by hackers from a linked device is the most obvious security danger. This may not seem to be much at first, and it might just be humiliating facts about your sex toy usage. That’s not all, however.

According to one Twitter user, someone acquired access to their Metamask. This browser plugin allows people to access Ethereum and other crypto businesses. After their machine was hacked, the user lost several NFTs and dollars, and the only unique item on their network that they could think of was a sex toy that they’d plugged in “to charge.”^[9]

1 WeWork

WeWork was a digital firm that helped new businesses and startups find shared office space. So it was really simply commercial real estate, albeit they experimented with virtual spaces alongside actual ones and worked very hard to deceive people into believing they were doing things when they weren’t. The firm would rent huge office buildings for a long time, then break them up into smaller rooms for more short-term tenants to utilize as their day-to-day office space. This concept managed to get a $47 billion value at the outset.

SoftBank invested $8 billion in the firm, and WeWork began purchasing office space in key cities throughout the nation. They estimated their company’s market to be worth more than $3 trillion, and no one thought they were crazy. They arrived at this figure by concluding that everybody who worked at a desk in a city with an office was eligible to join.

The CEO and his wife were well-known for their lack of business acumen, which was ludicrous. He used to work barefoot in the workplace and do tequila shots, while she once dismissed someone because their “energy” was wrong.

Its sole true strength seemed to be its ability to mismanage funds. It lost $1.9 billion in 2018 on $1.8 billion in sales, and its stock continued to plummet. The CEO had to leave just to restore trust in the company, but even that didn’t work. Their initial public offering (IPO) in 2019 was a flop and had to be canceled. They lost more than $2 billion in the first quarter of 2021 alone.^[10]

About a hundred years ago, the technology of the world was decidedly different than it is today. Automobiles for the average citizen were just becoming commonplace, TV had yet to be invented, and the idea of the internet would have sounded like madcap witchcraft to even the most astute scientist. But for all the advances we’ve enjoyed with technology and all the ways it’s made our lives better, it’s far from infallible. Tech is failing all the time and there have been some stunning fails in recent memory.

10. Juicero

What do trendy, hip, proactive go-getters love more than anything? If you guessed juice and/or pointless gadgets, you have your finger on the pulse. The global juice market is bearing down on $200 billion a year. So yes, we love juice. Kitchen gadgets rake in around $17.6 billion per year. It’s a match made in heaven to put them together! Or it should have been.

In 2017, Juicero seemed like it was brilliant. A fancy kitchen gadget to make tasty juice. Individual packets of fruit were pressed in an internet connected machine that was backed by some big name investors who put $120 million into the idea.

The machine itself was like a vise that squeezed pre-made veggie and fruit packets with four tons of force to make delicious, fresh juice. And then one day, someone realized you could just squeeze the packets by hand and didn’t need the $699 juice press. When reporters put it to the test, they discovered that they could get just as much juice, and faster, doing it bare handed. 

Even after dropping the price to $400, the Juicero had already fumbled its launch too badly. They went bankrupt after being in business only a few months.

9. Zillow’s A.I.

Zillow is a real estate company that gained a lot of press in recent years for its marketplace dominance. They spent much of 2021 snatching up so many houses that they had to put the kibosh on it for several months. They had suffered a serious technological failure born from a bit of overconfidence and possibly ignorance as well.

Most people never realized Zillow actually bought and sold houses, thinking it was just a forum for real estate agents to list property. The truth was the company was in the business of flipping properties, and they had developed some AI technology to assist them in this task. Their confidence was so high that they were letting the AI make cash offers for properties. That turned out to be a bad idea. 

By November, the company had a backlog of 7,000 houses they needed to get rid of, worth around $2.8 billion. They were forced to shut down their AI algorithm and suspend home buying as a result of its slapdash spending, proving definitively that you can’t let a website invest in real estate across an entire country. 

8. Tesla Bot

Few companies are as well known these days as Tesla. With Elon Musk constantly in the news, the company can’t help but pop up frequently as well, and not always just in relation to the antics of its CEO. Don’t forget, Tesla is still leading the way in the electric car game and they frequently come out with something new and exciting to keep them on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

In August 2021, Tesla held a press event to let the world know that they were working on a humanoid robot. The goal, according to Musk, was to create a machine that can do boring, dangerous or repetitive tasks for humans. So far so good. The problem was the rollout.

For whatever reason, Musk chose to show off the idea of the robot before anyone had made a real robot. So, instead, they rolled out a man in a spandex jumpsuit pretending to be a robot. And then he danced, and it wasn’t good.

Whether or not it was meant as a joke didn’t matter. The company was raked over the coals in the media the next day. Many people chalked it up as a stunt to distract from bad press, but whatever the true motivation, it made one of the biggest companies and one the richest men in the world look foolish.

7. The Freedom Phone

There is a certain subsection of America that will look at anything they find disagreeable or threatening as a direct attack on their freedom. And their response to this attack is to randomly and nonsensically start assigning the label “freedom” to anything they feel supports their POV. Remember when France opposed the Iraq War and someone tried to rename French fries “freedom fries?” It happened. 

In more recent history, the Freedom Phone was designed for supporters of Donald Trump, who wanted to get out from under “Big Tech’s” thumb and enjoy a smartphone that wasn’t going to censor them or push a liberal agenda. It would have an app store with no censorship and even an anti-surveillance operating system. And hey, if those are your politics, that’s great. There’s money to be made appealing to people based on their political beliefs. The problem was that the phone itself didn’t really align with its own politics.

To start with, the Freedom Phone was just a rebranded, cheap Chinese phone. The $499 Freedom Phone was actually a $119 Umidigi A9 phone. Never heard of Umidigi? Neither had anyone else, really. So it wasn’t made in America and the idea that it was surveillance free and censorship free, coming from China, where neither of those attributes is highly valued, turned out to be a bit of a joke. No specs were available on the website for buyers, the OS was replaced with one made by those Big Tech companies, there are huge privacy concerns with their unregulated app store, and nearly every tech website has advised buyers to avoid this thing like the plague. 

6. Quibi

What can you say about Quibi? This is arguably the biggest bomb of 2021, a fact only tempered by the knowledge literally everyone but those involved seemed to see it coming from a mile away. 

The idea behind Quibi seemed to be the merging of traditional TV and film with something more fast-paced and consumable like YouTube and TikTok. Shows were all going to be short, as in five minutes or so so you could watch them during a morning commute, and they featured some of the biggest names in Hollywood like Kevin Hart, Anna Kendrick, Sam Raimi, Idris Elba, and so many more. How were there so many big names? Could have had something to do with the nearly $2 billion in investment money. 

Quibi lasted for about seven months. No one was on board. You couldn’t watch Quibi on a TV, only a cell phone. You couldn’t screencap Quibi shows. It was far too expensive for what it was and, most importantly, nearly everything they made kind of sucked. Critics and viewers alike universally panned almost every show on the platform. 

5. Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 was released at the end of 2020 and was one of the most hyped games in recent years. It even starred Keanu Reeves, for goodness sake. It was also one of the fastest selling games ever, with nearly five million pre-orders before its launch and about 13.7 million sold in total. Sounds like a huge win, right? Well, not exactly.

Around 30,000 buyers ended up getting refunds from the developer because the game was so buggy as to be nearly unplayable. The PlayStation Store also issued refunds and ended up removing the game entirely. 

The game was extremely glitchy on both PS4 and Xbox One. Lawsuits were filed for making the games work so poorly on older generation systems and then hackers stole information from the developer. 

At the end of the day, even when people were able to enjoy the game and had it run perfectly, the game turned out to be okay. Just okay. It never lived up to the hype and a lot of people have mostly forgotten about it since its release.

4. Coolest Cooler

Making a cooler into a tech fail is no small feat. A cooler can literally be a styrofoam box, so a company needs to go above and beyond to make it a failure, let alone one that drags technology down with it. But that’s just what the Coolest Cooler did when it fumbled its way into existence a few years back.

In 2014, the Coolest Cooler was one of the biggest campaigns ever on Kickstarter, which raised a stunning $13 million, a fact no one could have seen coming. Who knew coolers were so popular?

The Coolest Cooler was supposed to be able to charge devices like your phone and feature its own blender and Bluetooth speaker, as well as some other knickknacks. Fast forward to 2019 and the company filed for bankruptcy as the cooler finally went down in flames. 

The CEO blamed Chinese tariffs for ending the product line, but product reviews from 2016 had already pointed out that the cooler was mostly garbage. With a $399 price tag, you’d expect a high tech cooler to at least work right, and this one didn’t. The blender was mediocre at best and the battery life was about four whole minutes of blending.

The cooler never got released during its Kickstarter because the company ran out of money, so backs had to pony up an additional $96 to get one if they still wanted it. Plus, people who didn’t back the Kickstarter and just bought one on Amazon got theirs faster. 

3. Galaxy Fold

Science fiction has enticed us for a few years with the idea of foldable tech. Things like phones or tablets that you can roll up and bend seem convenient because enough of us have dropped or crushed phones and broken the screens to make it a desirable feature. So, based on that, Samsung went ahead and made a screen that you couldn’t roll but you could at least fold. Or that was the idea.

The Galaxy Fold was unleashed in 2019 and it looked kind of like a wallet. You could fold it clean in half and then unfold it and your screen was right there, arguably giving you twice the screen capacity of the size of it in your pocket. The price tag for this remarkable tech was nearly $2,000. Things didn’t go well.

Once Samsung actually let reviewers try out the phones, they failed immediately. It took only a day or two for most reviewers to point out that their folding screens just didn’t work. Some developed bulges, some only worked on one side of the fold. Other reviews removed a protective film because they didn’t know not to remove it and basically destroyed the phone.

After the phone’s release, Samsung claimed to have sold one million units in about 4 months, then quickly walked that back saying the 1 million was what they hoped to sell. Samsung’s CEO later admitted they pushed the Fold out too soon and it was embarrassing. 

2. Hacked Sex Toys

By now, everyone knows that they need to protect everything that connects to the internet from hackers because they’re looming around every corner. We all have dozens of passwords to protect everything we own and with good reasons – hackers really will hack into anything. That includes sex toys.

There’s a strong and growing market for adult toys that are connected to the internet to allow remote control by other users for reasons you can imagine all on your own. But the problem is that few of these devices have any security built into them. 

The most obvious security risk is any personal data that can be gleaned by hackers from a connected device. This may not seem like much at first, and may only be embarrassing information related to your use of sex toys. But that’s not all. 

One user on Twitter recently pointed out how their computer had been hacked and someone gained access to their Metamask, a browser extension that lets you access Ethereum and other crypto business. The user lost some NFTs and funds and the only unusual thing they could think of on their network was a sex toy they’d plugged in to charge. 

1. WeWork

WeWork was a tech startup company that helped provide shared office space for new companies and startups. So basically just real estate for businesses, though they also dabbled in virtual spaces alongside real ones and tried very hard to dupe people into thinking they did things when they really did very little. The company would rent large office spaces long term, and then divide up smaller spaces within that property for more short-term renters to use it as their day-to-day office space. Somehow, this idea managed an initial valuation of $47 billion.  

The company got an $8 billion investment from SoftBank and they set about buying office spaces in major cities across the country. They projected the market for their business to be upwards of $3 trillion and no one thought that sounded insane. They got this number by deciding that literally anyone who worked at a desk in a city where they had an office qualified as a potential member. 

The CEO and his wife were notoriously bad at business and almost cartoonishly inept. He worked barefoot and did tequila shots in the office while she once fired someone because their “energy” was off. 

The company’s only real strength seemed to be mismanaging money. In 2018, they lost $1.9 billion off of $1.8 billion in revenue and continued to tank. The CEO had to resign just to instill some faith in the business, not that it worked at all. In 2019, their IPO failed and had to be pulled. In 2021 they reported over $2 billion in losses in the first quarter alone.