A Decade in Technology: The Greatest Misses and Let-Downs of the 2010s
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
As we’ve paid heed to the continual ramping up of the pace in technological development — up until the point of actuarial escape velocity, and beyond — we’ve seen new technologies arrive into our lives with incredible frequency and often spectacular consequences.
As often as not, they then recede from our attentions with rather less spectacle. The technologies that have failed to ‘hit’ in the 2010s failed for a variety of reasons — a spirit that contrasted with the zeitgeist, an intensity of hype that outstripped the actual technology’s limits, or a mis-estimation of pure utility — and among those failures stand technologies that generations have yearned to see come to pass.
Some of them may have their day yet — but nevertheless, here are four representative technological failures of the decade gone past, why they failed, and what’s next for them.
Virtual Reality
We begin our list with perhaps the most heartbreaking of its inclusions; a technology that was, for decades, most ultimately symbolic of future aspiration, at last arrived in earnest the 10s. It was a comparatively flat reception. Resplendent in its unwieldy helm of a headset and remotes poised…
