Now to the second question: why do so many inventions create useless products?

Why don’t we see more improvements to standard devices that have real value? Can’t the smartest guys in the room see where better products are required and develop them?

The Need for Useful Products

Well, for all their smarts, a lot of tech bros can’t seem to imagine a need outside of their own very narrow life experience. Mostly young, white, single males, they prioritize their personal needs and desires as defined by daily life in start-ups, labs, and skunk works.

What emerges are new “products’ that are stunningly irrelevant and unimportant to ordinary Americans.

• A robot that can run track races – what’s the point?
• A flying car – to create more and deadlier accidents
• Robot dogs – when we already have perfectly good ones
• The Hyperloop – just can’t make that one work
• Google Glasses – who needs them outside of the CIA?
• Another data center? Anywhere?

These inventions are often announced with great fanfare, often at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They media hypes them uncritically as if they are or will be important. But, then, the media lives on a diet of the new and unusual.

Segways were introduced as a product that would change how the world get around. They do have uses and people do use them in large places like convention centers, warehouses, and docks. They are also used for touring cities. But those applications are limited: Segways have never changed the world’s transportation needs.

Useless Products No One Needs

Real dogs are pretty good at doing a lot of things.  No, they can’t fire automatic weapons but they can locate people trapped by a disaster and help blind people to get around, which is even more important. People who box and MMA fighters are already excellent athletes who don’t need replacing. In fact, people and dogs don’t need to be replaced by mechanical devices.

Courtesy of CNN

No one needs a flying car. That’s just a disaster waiting to happen. Given that automobile accidents happen all the time, we shouldn’t have to worry about a car falling out of the sky on top of us.

These useless products pop up regularly but real products to meet real needs seem to lie far outside of our current inventors’ experience. If they can’t imagine it, they can’t create it. And they are stunningly unimaginative.

The Shock of Reality

Courtesy of Global Defense Technology

It would probably come as a shock to them that the world holds hungry people who can’t get a meal by calling DoorDash. That there are many places where clean water can’t be had, even in plastic bottles from Fiji. They seem to have no elderly parents or grandparents who could use some support. They don’t appear to know there are children in desperate need of life-saving healthcare. Given their arrogance and self-involvement, they might be surprised to learn that there are children at all.

Wrapped up in the drive to prove their brilliance, these men (and they are all men) power on down the road, driven only by what’s important only to them.

These inventors have clearly never heard the phrase, “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.” Also, they might just have a stunted vision of what they should do with all those smarts.

Useful Inventions for Real Needs

Why can’t our new generation of tech bros focus on real needs?

We don’t need inventions that do the work people do now. We need new products that do work people can’t do. Or shouldn’t do. Work that’s dangerous, requires superhuman abilities, or has to be done in an environment where people can’t survive. Think of a clean room on the moon[1], a device that monitors active volcanoes, a robot that can lift a 300-pound hospital patient, a medical unit that administers vaccines during a pandemic, a water-purification process that works without electrical power, an unmanned vehicle that explores the deepest ocean.

I guess the tech bros have to get a little bit older and wiser, perhaps getting some experience in the real world before they outgrow this silly phase. Maybe having families with actual children could give them some ideas. Watching their parents age might also stimulate their creativity.

Who knows: changing the the battery in a smoke detector at 3:00 am might also get them thinking. Oh wait, someone already did that. On to the next thing. How about an electric can opener that also opens the lids on jars and bottles? I could use one of those.

[1] Forget that one. Lunar regolith would make it very difficult to maintain a clean room. But you get the point.

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