The Worst Technologies of 2023

Tuesday - December 26 2023, 01:08 UTC - 11 months ago

This year marks the lessons learned from the Titan Submersible implosion and other technology disasters like GM's Cruise division's robotaxis, lab-grown meat from Upside Foods and the possibly failed 'Ai Pin'- all of which demonstrate the consequences behind wishful thinking and ignoring good engineering.

Welcome to our annual list of the worst technologies. This year, one technology disaster in particular holds lessons for the rest of us: the Titan submersible that imploded while diving to see the Titanic. Everyone had warned Stockton Rush, the sub’s creator, that it wasn’t safe. But he believed innovation meant tossing out the rule book and taking chances. He set aside good engineering in favor of wishful thinking. He and four others died.

To us it shows how the spirit of innovation can pull ahead of reality, sometimes with unpleasant consequences. It was a phenomenon we saw time and again this year, like when GM’s Cruise division put robotaxis into circulation before they were ready. Was the company in such a hurry because it’s been losing $2 billion a year? Others find convoluted ways to keep hopes alive, like a company that is showing off its industrial equipment but is quietly still using bespoke methods to craft its lab-grown meat. The worst cringe, though, is when true believers can’t see the looming disaster, but we do. That’s the case for the new "Ai Pin," developed at a cost of tens of millions, that’s meant to replace smartphones. It looks like a titanic failure to us.

This summer we were glued to our news feeds as drama unfolded 3,500 meters below the ocean’s surface. An experimental submarine with five people aboard was lost after descending to see the wreck of the Titanic. The Titan was a radical design for a deep-sea submersible: a minivan-size carbon fiber tube, operated with a joystick, that aerospace engineer Stockton Rush believed would open the depths to a new kind of tourism. His company, OceanGate, had been warned the vessel hadn’t been proved to withstand 400 atmospheres of pressure. His answer? "I think it was General MacArthur who said ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break," Rush told a YouTuber. But breaking the rules of physics doesn’t work. On June 22, four days after contact was lost with the Titan, a deep-sea robot spotted the sub’s remains. It was most likely destroyed in a catastrophic implosion. In addition to Rush, the following passengers perished: .

Instead of killing animals for food, why not manufacture beef or chicken in a laboratory vat? That’s the humane idea behind "lab-grown meat." The problem, though, is making the stuff at a large scale. Take Upside Foods. The startup, based in Berkeley, California, had raised more than half a billion dollars and was showing off rows of big, gleaming steel bioreactors. But journalists soon learned that Upside was a bird in borrowed feathers. Its big tanks weren’t producing its flagship "whole textured chicken" filets; to produce those it was growing chicken skin cells in much smaller laboratory flasks. Thin layers of cells were then being manually scooped up and pressed into chicken pieces. In other words, Upside was using lots of labor, plastic, and energy to make hardly any meat. Samir Qurashi, a former employee, told the Wall Street Journal he knows why Upside puffed up the potential of lab-grown food. "It’s the ‘fake it till you make it’ principle," he said. And even then when you make it, chances are it’ll leave a bad taste.