Rusty promises

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to drop a list I’ve been noodling on for months: high tech dreams that didn’t come true—breathless tech promises that weren’t kept. 

We’re suckers for tech visionaries feeding us fantasies that we hope will come true. Many do come true, though most take longer than expected. (I vaguely remember someone, perhaps Bill Gates, saying that you can accurately predict What or When, but not both. It’s a mug’s game to say that a tech prediction will never come true—though I wish more mugs would do that, as an inoculation against to techno-utopianism.) 

Such broken promises are sometimes called zeerust, defined by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd as “the particular kind of datedess which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic” in The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet—But There Ought to Be. Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeerust)  calls zeerust it an outdated vision of the future; there’s a nice discussion on TVTropes.org, and a list of technologies on Tropedia. Zeerust is also a town in North West Province, South Africa.

Zeerust, South Africa (SABC)

I’ve ended up with three lists. Curiously, the first is post-war and the second and third post-millennium. The prophets were certainly busy in the Eighties and Nineties, so I wonder why that seems a fallow period for zeerust. Perhaps it’s neither long enough ago to be nostalgic about, nor recent enough to remember. Many dot-com failures were companies, not categories, and the categories did eventually succeed (as Amazon.com): Pets.com, Webvan, eToys.com, Geocities, Kozmo.com, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves.

Fifties enthusiasm

Here are some unrealized dreams, many of them promises that I grew up with as a teenager in the Sixties. Some have been realized but with a very limited scope; the U.S. military can be relied on to keep uneconomic technologies alive almost indefinitely (e.g. hovercraft). One can usually find a handful of start-ups still trying to make any given dream a reality (e.g., airships).

The Achilles Heel of these ideas usually turned out to be a physics-economics double whammy.

• Brain/computer interfaces
• Flying cars
• Flying wings
• Food irradiation
• Food pills
• Hovercraft
• Hydrofoils
• Jetpacks
• Nuclear fusion for power generation
• Nuclear-powered planes, ships, and trains
• Supersonic passenger planes

2000’s Dreams

Michael Mullany’s “8 Lessons from 20 Years of Hype Cycles”  (2016) identifies failed Gartner Hype Cycle technologies that that we’ve conveniently forgotten. He observes that “Out of the more than 200 technologies ever listed, just over 50 individual technologies appear for just a single year on the Hype Cycle - never to reappear again”; “an additional 20% of all technologies that were tracked for multiple years on the Hype Cycle became obsolete before reaching any kind of mainstream success.” Here are some, with the year of their first appearance on a Hype Cycle chart. As one would expect, they’re mostly digital tech:

• 802.16 WiMAX, 2005
• Desktop Linux for Business, 2003
• Emergent computing, 1995 (computing based on distributed evolutionary algorithms)
• Expertise Location, 2007 (a knowledge management approach that connects people to knowledgeable colleagues)
• Folksonomies, 2006
• Mesh networks, 2003
• Social TV, 2011
• Truth Verification, 2004
• Ultrawideband, 2003

Post-recession hype

Christopher Mims had a story in the WSJ today  about crazy ideas from the tech boom of the last decade or so. VC Follies are well represented.

Here are a few, some with reminders of what they were about—oh, how quickly we forget:

• 3-D TV
• Crypto lenders (Celsius Network, BlockFi)
• Pepper the robot
• Quibi (a short-form video site)
• Robot taxis
• Scooter companies (Bird, Lime) (birdlime, 2: something that ensnares, Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/birdlime)
• Selfie drones
• Soylent (the meal replacement of choice for techies) (had nobody watched the movie?)
• Zume (aimed to make pizzas with robots in the back of delivery trucks)

xkcd