Some technologies always seem to lie just over the horizon. Where, we ask, are our robot servants, jetpacks and flying cars? Closer to hand, where are the self-driving cars that don’t require a human driver, the VR headsets that don’t make you throw up and the AI that is actually intelligent?
Nicole Kobie is a UK-based technology journalist who specializes in skewering the pretensions of tech-bros and the hype of venture capitalists. As such, she is the right author for this entertaining and insightful history of futuristic technologies. Her book is full of the admirable feats of scientists and engineers “toiling against the gravity of failure”. The chief entertainment, though, is provided by the screw-ups.
Take the Convair 118, a 1940s car that could be flown by reversing it into position under an attachable (and separately rentable) airplane. It was canceled after it crashed because the test pilot had been looking at the fuel gauge on the car’s dashboard, not the plane’s. Or the Sega VR, from the short-lived 1990s VR boom. It was withdrawn, partly because it was possible to set it up so that your eyes were forced to look outwards in slightly different directions, which caused motion sickness and headaches. Or, more recently, Apple’s ski mask-like virtual reality goggles, launched in June 2023. They added a live video feed of the wearer’s eyes on the front of the screen. To make the user look less weird.
The robots are even more entertaining. The Knightscope K5 security droid that rolled itself into a fountain in Washington DC in 2017 and “drowned”. Alfie, the robo-butler who promised to cook you a meal and unload your dishwasher — except he was controlled by a remote operator based in the Philippines. The voice-activated robots of a Japanese hotel, who kept waking up snoring customers by asking them, “Sorry, I couldn’t catch that, could you repeat your request?” Most of the robot staff were “sacked” in 2019.
Most lovable was Shakey, a 1960s Stanford research robot that looked “like a dishwasher on wheels”. It would perform apparently random pirouettes (because of a bit of old code designed to stop it tangling its cable) and suddenly stop to stare long and hard at the corner of the room (because it was recalibrating its location, not experiencing existential despair).
Where are our robot servants, jetpacks and flying cars?
Few of these tech fails are recounted purely for entertainment. They are revealing about the people behind the technology. In March 2018, Elaine Herzberg was knocked down in Tempe, Arizona by an Uber test car — the first pedestrian to be killed by a driverless car. (It actually had a safety driver, but she was not paying attention.) Second by tragic second, Kobie details the series of failures in the lead-up to the accident. How the car struggled to identify a jaywalker as a pedestrian. How because Herzberg was using her bike to wheel her belongings rather than riding it — she was homeless — it failed to identify the bicycle. How Uber had incorporated a one-second reassessment pause to avoid a bumpy ride — all that inconvenient slamming-on of brakes at false alarms. The system was designed by people — and designed to serve people — who expected the world to behave in a certain way. It didn’t, and the victim was an impoverished woman.
Kobie is excoriating about “billionaires’ bad ideas”, and the blinkered white-male monoculture of tech firms. Still, she recognizes a good idea when she sees it, and stresses that, often, tomorrow’s tech is in fact here, just not where we had expected it to find it or perhaps not looking quite like we had imagined. Robots, for instance, are already everywhere. In car-manufacturing plants, notably, and Ocado warehouses, where thousands of wheeled boxes “shuffle grocery orders” autonomously. Computer-brain interfaces have been remarkably unsuccessful — although fascinating — unless you count pacemakers and cochlear implants, which have been enabling hearts to beat and deaf people to hear since 1958 and 1961 respectively.
Roads populated solely by driverless cars, Kobie says, are “unlikely in my lifetime”, but there is already a driverless bus on the Forth Bridge in Scotland (sort of: it still has a safety driver and a conductor), and you are enjoying “driverless” technologies every time your car gently bumps you back into lane. As for flying cars, they have existed since the 1950s, at least for those with “a pilot’s license and an over-full bank account”. The electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) craft that are presently booming, though, are more likely to replace the corporate helicopter and the air ambulance than the family estate car.
It has proved “hard to get flying cars off the ground”, Kobie comments. She is often rather droll. Describing how, in 1984, Birmingham achieved a world first by connecting its airport and railway station by “maglev” (floating) train, she suggests that “it’s a lot of new technology to get people and their suitcases a short way”. Trying on Google’s ill-fated augmented-reality “Glass” glasses (the ones notoriously sported by “Glassholes”), she likens the experience to “watching a broken TV from across a large living room”. And she wonders if the many failures-to-launch of augmented and virtual reality might have a very simple explanation. Maybe we don’t really want to wear our technology on our faces or have it implanted in our brains. “Maybe what we want is to be able to tuck it all away in our pockets.”
This, ultimately, is her pragmatic and principled take. Tech fails when it does not give people what they really need. And it seems we do not really want the future. We want the present, improved.
James McConnachie is a U.K.-based journalist and author of several books, including The Book of Love
