Sun, Apr 30, 2017 page15

• Firms churning out useless tech harm innovation

  • By Leonid Bershidsky / Bloomberg View
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  The story about a US$400 Internet-connected juicer that turned out to be superfluous since a human could simply squeeze juice from its producer’s proprietary packs by hand was destined to go viral and did, with more than 800,000 hits on the Bloomberg Web site and strong reactions in other publications.

  It is evidence of a growing resistance to Silicon Valley-style innovation. Countering this resistance is not just a marketing problem for the industry; it is a strategic and perhaps even existential one.

  It is easy to laugh at a juice squeezer produced by a relatively small start-up, whose real competence is in making fancy fruit-and-vegetable packets. It is not really problem-solving tech; it is a money-raising gimmick.

  The laugh is on the investors who fell for the concept of a high-tech device whose price is an entry fee for a subscription service — which delivers the juice packs.

  Disparaging something proposed by Tesla Inc founder and chief executive Elon Musk or Facebook Inc founder Mark Zuckerberg is not as risk-free for a tech pundit, if only because they have armies of fans that rip into critics, and yet these innovation gurus, too, are increasingly proposing gadgets offering solutions to problems that are sometimes imaginary, often unimportant and in some cases are features, rather than bugs, of the human existence.

  The media are generally enthusiastic about fully electric cars, though, in terms of consumer qualities, they are at this point inferior to gasoline-powered ones, with shorter driving ranges and long charging times. There is a lot of excitement about self-driving vehicles, though they cannot be safely used on roads without clear lane markings, in poor visibility conditions and under a myriad other common circumstances.

  The assumption is that all these obstacles quickly will be overcome: Throw enough money at engineers and they will get there somehow.

  Recent promises from Zuckerberg and Musk on brain-computer interfaces are the latest example. Facebook promises to turn thoughts into typed text at the speed of 100 words per minute by scanning the brain without surgical intervention, though researchers have achieved only eight words per minute with the help of an implant.

  Musk’s new company, Neuralink Corp, plans to use electrodes implanted in the brain to exchange information between human and computer.

  Both promises carry unrealistic timeframes, which is fine because optimism about cutting-edge science rarely gets punished even if it is an indirect method of boosting a tech company’s stock price.

  The problem is deeper, though. Musk, a slicker marketer than Zuckerberg, talks about initially releasing a technology that would help people with brain damage — from strokes, for example.

  He is aware that twice as many Americans are worried as enthusiastic about brain enhancement through implants. So he is pointing to a real problem that can be solved using this decidedly creepy technology.

  Facebook is talking about “sharing thoughts,” hitting precisely on the most worrying aspects of the nascent technology: Who wants to share uncensored thoughts, especially with a company that collects information about its users without explaining to them exactly what is harvested? Who wants to give a machine built by a corporate entity access to one’s brain?

  Trust or desperation is required to give up control, and while the tech under development today requires that we allow devices and software to control more and more of our existence, there is a natural limit to how much people are willing to trust the sellers of these products.

  Breaking through it might do society a disservice if the makers are not particularly trustworthy. At the same time, few people are desperate enough to actually need the technological enhancements. Most people can drive, type or adjust a thermostat by hand.

  A robotic prosthetic hand that can help tie a shoelace is a godsend to a one-armed person. A robot that can actually put the lace in a running shoe — you know, string the hard plastic aglet through the little holes so that the lace can then be tied — would remove a major headache for athletic shoe makers, such as Adidas AG, which currently hire workers to do it.

  Tasks that desperately need automation and tech solutions are narrow. Automated driving works fine in mining operations and ports. Brain electrodes can enable a completely paralyzed person to communicate.

  However, the Silicon Valley mode of operation is to hype up these technologies to the general public, which does not really need most of them.

  Even if there is little hard data about it, the pushback is beginning. Read about the juice squeezer and feel the almost tangible irritation. Thinking smaller, and applying resources and energy to narrow, specific problems could be a good chance to build trust before it disappears entirely.

  Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion Web site Slon.ru.

  This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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