Technology is responsible for everything good that ever happened. Never mind the iPhone in your pocket, Michelangelo would never have had time to paint the Sistine Chapel if he’d had to hunt-and-gather his food every day, and without the advance of tools Mozart would have composed his concertos arranged for Grunt and Banging Rocks.
Unfortunately not every use of human ingenuity is really useful, ingenious, or – if you apply a lower intelligence limit to the species – even “human.”
1. The Hermit Nap Station
The Hermit Nap Station allegedly allows you to nap anywhere you want: The maker’s under the misapprehension that the difficult part of sleeping in public is bothering to move a small amount of cloth over yourself. As opposed to the literally millions of people you wouldn’t trust with unopposed access to your possessions and unconscious, unresisting body. Add to this is the most useless alert lights since SUVs came with an “I don’t care about fuel-efficiency” LED indicator: red and green lights telling passers-by whether it’s okay to interrupt your sleep or not. Assuming that they’re polite enough to listen, and that any light less powerful than a flesh-melting laser can be trusted as night-watchman. And that you’re the sort of insane individual who’d curl up in a constructed cocoon in public but still be prepared to entertain visitors.
Tip: When the project’s own camera is better focused on the young inventor than the actual equipment, it’s because even they know it’s garbage. And I’m not sure if we’re meant to have noticed but the “shell” is a 50/50 mix of felt and gap. It could only be a worse wrapping if it was made of hungry weevils.
2. Robo Secretary
Secretaries serve to save their employers all kinds of trudging tasks, filing forms and fielding visitors to allow everyone else to get on with the work. So what could be better than an android “Saya” secretary that requires constant maintenance, has to be carried anywhere it needs to go, and forces people to say everything extremely clearly several times? Apart from anything?
We’ve all been in offices – they can’t run so much as a photocopier without the entire staff trying to fix the stupid thing once a month. A lifelike android body would permanently cripple an entire company, especially when everyone’s too polite to search for the power switch to ‘turn her off and on again’ (the first and last line of office equipment maintenance). The advertising boldly claims 300 words, but 700 phrases, meaning that they’ve clearly counted “Hello”, “Sir”, and “Hello Sir” as entirely different functions. If your business can operate with only 300 spoken words, please keep up your worthy work at the Sign Language Institute. Or the Severe Head Trauma Employment Centre.
Lifelike androids are certainly coming; the problem is the ‘uncanny valley’ – the point where things are close enough to human that the remaining flaws become horrifying. For example: We don’t find Morph disturbing, but the jerky, sick-looking lumpiness of Saya’s face is horrifying. This at least means she’ll be able to prevent visitors from distracting the workforce.
3. Catastrophically Costly Computer Cases
The exclusive “Zeus Computer” line of cases, are simultaneously the best and worst items on this list. Best because, as a case to hold your computer’s guts in, they actually do something. Worse because they’re a real product which means someone somewhere really spends almost half a million pounds on a jewelled PC case. That isn’t hyperbole, or exaggeration-for-comic-effect: that’s a real half a million, as in “five with five zeroes after it,” pounds. For a computer case (standard cost: absolutely nothing, coming as it does with the rest of the computer.) And one more thing:
They look terrible. It doesn’t matter if the ‘Jupiter’ model is pure platinum inset with diamonds; it looks like something you’d see holding glitter in the bedroom of a teenage girl with earrings the size of hula hoops.
