Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and tech giants have taken this adage to heart. As soon as one company does something new, it seems that every competitor copies their idea and implements it in their products as well. It can have amazing consequences for consumers, as good ideas quickly make their way to multiple devices. Instead of having to buy one specific model, you have access to the same technology from multiple competing manufacturers.
Unfortunately, this strategy is a double-edged sword. Not all ideas are great, but sometimes you can’t tell immediately. So, it happens that everyone starts copying an interesting, new idea, only to find out it’s terrible, or just not that useful. The problem arises when it has already made its way to the market, and a lot of money has been invested in it, making these companies reluctant to give up on the idea.
Nowadays, with the constant push for the next big thing in tech, it seems that these bad ideas are finding their way into the mainstream even more frequently. Here are some of the worst tech trends that shouldn’t have left the drafting table.
Touchscreen everything
Does my fridge really need a screen?
A marriage between a phone and a touchscreen was a masterful idea. It allowed for better, faster navigation, more screen real estate, more functionality. Overall, it made the phone much better, and led to the modern smartphone with all the ways it changed our way of life. So, naturally, manufacturers started implementing it elsewhere, and the results were, to put it mildly, mixed.
Sure, putting a screen as a centerpiece of the entertainment system in your car has its upsides. It helps with the navigation, and allows for much more aesthetic menus that you can easily personalize. However, combining it with a touchscreen is absolutely terrible, and makes going through the menus (that tend to be extremely poorly designed, by the way) a terrible chore. Let’s just go back to physical knobs and their satisfying clicks.
In the car, a touchscreen might, somehow, be excused. But riddle me this: why would I want a touchscreen on a fridge? Is it really necessary to operate a food processor with a touchscreen? When I’m cooking, my hands tend to get wet or dirty, and both of those things are not helpful when trying to operate a finicky touch interface. All you get from all those touchscreens, aside from unhelpful tech and higher prices to pay, are fingerprint smudges that you have to clean all the time.
Let’s just make it smart and always connected
There will be no downsides to it at all, I swear
If you like your electronics full of tech, the “smartification” of everything around you might have looked like a great leap forward a couple of years ago. Everything in your home connected to an app on your phone, with all the functions under your fingertips, that sounded like the future.
Well, the future is now, and smart appliances are everywhere. The aforementioned fridge connects to the internet and plays a YouTube video, while the food processor has to communicate with a server overseas in order to turn on the correct setting. Everything is connected to the internet, and it seems that every choice you make is, somehow, making its way into your Google Ads or purchase recommendations. Your data has become a currency, and every smart appliance is doing its best to harvest as much of it as it possibly can.
That’s not even all. The dream was to have one app that connects to all your smart stuff. Well, that’s not really the case, and every manufacturer seems to have their own app, with their own proprietary connection that simply won’t work with other brands. Even if you somehow connect it all together, the chance that everything will keep working at least a week without problems is lower than seeing a Loch Ness monster. Let’s just add the fact that, at any time, a manufacturer can decide to turn off the server responsible for handling your devices’ operations and make them non-operational in the blink of an eye.
Maybe we could add AI to this AI?
Does no one remember Terminator?
Even though it’s been a couple of years now, the newest big thing still seems to be AI. While controversial from the very beginning, you could argue that the idea was decent: make something that approximates the data it gathered and spews out the outcome in an accessible, human-like fashion. And while this functionality is, to an extent, still a part of it, AI overall has become probably the most hated tech feature in recent years.
Let’s tackle the ethics first, without going into much detail. AI is terrible for the environment due to its reliance on massive amounts of data and computational power, and it’s as terrible for human cognitive functions as well. That’s not all, as all the most popular models were built, in a large chunk, on stolen content, which is vital to the answers they are generating with each prompt.
Yes, AI can have its uses and can, theoretically, be used as a tool to improve human abilities. However, the way it’s designed, implemented, and advertised certainly doesn’t steer artificial intelligence in this ethical, sustainable way.
So, seeing how unethical it is, tech giants went all in on AI and started packing it everywhere they could. Phones are full of it, often losing tried-and-true functionality that gets replaced by AI-driven counterparts that are worse in every way. Every assistant is AI now, and half of the pictures you see online are (very visibly) creations of AI tools. There are many more problems, such as the impact AI has on the job market and productivity. Overall, though, AI everywhere benefits only the select few companies that are responsible for developing these models, with everyone else losing, either short or long-term.
