Mankind has made it to the moon with incredible technology – technology which is often advanced by some lunatic slapping two crazy things together and being right about it working. One man thought sticking flammable liquid on wheels would work well, another thought teaching fused sand to think was possible, while a third fell onto some bread while running with scissors. But for every high-tech hybrid there are thousands of embarrassing failures, and here we see three that’d be laughed off the set of Dragon’s Den: Kid’s Edition.
1. Telepathic pinball
Congratulations are in order for the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface research consortium, who found the one piece of technology in existence which isn’t made cooler by mind control. The whole point of pinball is the physical interaction with metal and machine, the true tactile feel which turns two flippers into a game of skill, the psychic scream as fiendishly-harnessed physics flings your ball through the precisely machined gap between the flippers for the third time in a row. That’s why computer pinball games are like tofu burgers, and even less fun to play with.
Unless you’re Professor Xavier you can’t tilt the machine, and the BBCI aren’t fooling anyone: pinball machines are big and bright, but it doesn’t distract from the fact that it still takes more computer than the average person owns to control just two flipper buttons.
2. Wolverine-branded TV
I'm the best there is at what I do, which is make money for Marvel.
We started with the image because there was no way to describe this without at least implying you’re an idiot: it’s a thousand pound television branded by Marvel to look like Wolverine. And by “branded” we mean “colored yellow for added ‘we picked his stupidest costume ever for this’ kudos.” If you’re aware that televisions normally display something else when they’re in use, that being what differentiates them from incredible expensive and fragile pictures that people like staring at, well done on being better at technology than Marvel. Who own Iron Man.
But don’t worry, the TV makes sure you see the incredible expensive branding by displaying the Wolverine “splash screen” for eight seconds every time you turn it on, or in other words, you’re paying £125 per second to prevent your set from showing the actual program while punching yourself in the skull shouting “I’m an idiot!” And if you’re not doing that last bit, you should be.
3. IBM Jeopardizes Computer Technology
IBM announced plans to build a computer capable of winning at Jeopardy last April, and unfortunately it wasn’t on the 1st. Because they’ve really done it. The “Watson” system is being trained to defeat human contenders who’ve won on the actual TV show, and if there’s a more pointless use of over four tons of computer hardware we’ve yet to see it. You could try making Pentium chips in a deep-fat fryer and still not be wasting technology as pointlessly.
A giant megacomputer forced to play daytime TV - it's like we're trying to create Skynet
Even worse than the concept is the idiotic “no internet” restriction on the project – Watson isn’t allowed to go online to answer questions, aka “The whole reason a computer could be better at this”, and it isn’t like they can train it to Deep Thought deduce its way to any answer. If it isn’t connected to the internet you just have to copy most of the damn thing onto local hard drives, which is why the shameful machine’s bigger than a Land Rover but less useful than a Robin Reliant. You could not create a more pointless task for a robot mind without entering it in a “Scratch Yourself” competition.
Only one thing stops us from calling for the project’s shutdown: IBM may be outfoxing artificial intelligence by training it to beat only our most worthless humans at our most pointless activities. Then when the machines attack, they won’t use their superior combat strength but insist on shouting “What is the capital of Assyria?”
And we can say that in safety because Watson’s not allowed online.
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