It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
Printer drivers.
Apparently sending data serially at glacial speeds is impossible.
Flying cars.
I’ll go against the grain and say literally all of it. Every piece of technology that exists is a compromise between what the designer wants to do and the constraints of what is practical or possible to actually pull off. Therefore, all technology “fails” on at least some metric the designer would like it to achieve. Technology is all about improvement and working with imperfection. If we don’t keep trying to make things better, then innovation stops. With your example of VR, I’d say that after having seen multiple versions of VR in my lifetime, the one that we have now is way more successful and impactful, especially in commercial uses rather than consumer products. Engineers can now tour facilities before they are built with VR headsets to see design flaws that they might not have seen just with a traditional model review, for example. Furthermore, what we have now is just an iteration on what we had before. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, people take what came before, look at what worked and what didn’t, and what could be fixed with other technologies that have developed in the meantime. That’s the iteration process.
Probably not top ten of mind, but Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been trotted out by the fossil fuel industry for a generation as a panacea for carbon emissions, in order to prevent any real legislation limiting the combustion of hydrocarbons.
AI, Mass Surveillance and privatization of services people need to live and National security technology
Twitter/X. It is not a free speech platform. Give it up and move on to something else. Stop supporting these billionaires and stop giving them your time.
Social media as a whole, honestly. Way back in 2014 I read an article about the “social media cycle” (not their words IIRC). Basically, a new platform gets popular with teens and college-age kids, then their parents join, then the kids have to move to something else because they don’t want to be on the same platform as their parents. I could be misremembering. It was a comparison between Facebook and Snapchat.
Anyway, the Fediverse helps, but since fedi platforms are largely clones of their normie counterparts (Lemmy/PieFed = reddit, Mastodon = Twitter, PeerTube = YouTube) they inherit many of the same problems. I know I bring this up a lot, but on these platforms, content is the focus, but on traditional forums, people are the focus.
I’m going to get downvoted for this
Open source has its place, but the FOSS community needs to wake up to the fact that documentation, UX, ergonomics, and (especially) accessibility aren’t just nice-to-haves. Every year has been “The Year of the Linux Desktop™” but it never takes off, and it never will until more people who aren’t developers get involved.
Encryption with safe, unexploitable backdoors.
AI
The big one would be viable nuclear fusion, we’ve been trying to figure it out and spending money on it for like 80 years now.
That being said, there’s actually a lot of verified progress on it lately by reputable organizations and international teams.
In its defence, that assumed it was properly funded. Its actual funding was very limited.
I believe most of the critical problems have been solved. The only major one left is keeping the reactor walls stable. They have a tendency to transmute, which causes multiple problems.
It’s only 30 years away!
Just like it was 30 years ago.
Ah, the so called Fusion Constant.
Printers.
The flying car, AI, cold fusion, anti-aging.
The flying car,
Those are called helicopters. They’re literally just cars but every advantage and every downside is amplified.
They’re amazing for taking a small number of people somewhere, at massive cost to the surroundings. They’re noisy, take up a lot of space, require lots of specialized Infrastructure just for them and they are incredibly dangerous to their surroundings.
cold fusion
That’s not a technology, it’s a scam. Regular fusion is absolutely real, it’s just super complicated and hugely underfunded.
No, a helicopter is a flying vehicle that can’t drive on city streets. A flying car is a street legal vehicle that can take off and land like a plane. https://youtu.be/a2tDOYkFCYo for an idea of what I’m talking about.
Doesn’t matter if cold fusion is a scam or not. People keep trying to make it work which fits OP’s question.
Nobody but quacks is trying to make cold fusion work. Are you confusing it with “regular” nuclear fusion?
Whatever.
Cinema movies in 3D with the stupid glasses.
Home printers
Politics: IF the political-mechanism selects-for DarkTriad, putting that in authority,
THEN … it’s only going to make our world non-viable.
Eventually fatally.
Other criteria & selection is required, XOR humankind self-extinguishes, this-century: The Great Filter.
You can’t have a world-species be rampaging/tantruming for toddler-ego, through planetscaping industry & militaries, being ruled by DarkTriad in authority, without extinction being raised into maximal-likelihood.
Could be, although we’ve had a few psychopaths in charge of world-ending nuclear arsenals and avoided the worst of it for now.
