MIT Technology Review has published its annual list of the worst technologies from the past year, and one tech disaster stands out in particular. This is, of course, the Titan submarine that imploded in an attempt to reach the sunken Titanic. Although everyone warned Stockton Rush, the creator of the submarine, that his submarine was not safe, he ignored the warnings and neglected engineering in favor of his wild desires, which led to the death of four people.
Rush vividly demonstrated how the spirit of innovation can sometimes go far ahead of reality, often with quite unpleasant consequences. This is a phenomenon that could be seen multiple times this year, for example, when GM launched robotaxis that were not ready for deployment.
Titan Submarine
Last summer, everyone followed the drama unfolding 3,500 meters below the ocean’s surface. An experimental submarine with five people was lost after it descended to view the wreck of the Titanic. The Titan was a radical design for a deep-sea submarine – a carbon fiber tube the size of a minivan, controlled by a joystick, which aerospace engineer Stockton Rush believed would open a new type of ‘deep-sea’ tourism. His company, OceanGate, was warned that the vessel could not withstand the pressure at that depth.
– I think General MacArthur said, you are remembered by the rules you break – Rush said in response to those remarks.
But breaking the laws of physics does not work. On June 22, four days after contact was lost with Titan, a deep-sea robot spotted the wreckage of the submarine that suffered a catastrophic implosion.
Lab-Grown Meat
Instead of killing animals for food, why not produce beef or chicken in a lab barrel? This is the humane idea behind ‘lab-grown meat.’ The problem, however, is scaling things up. Take Upside Foods, a startup based in Berkeley, California, which raised over half a billion dollars and showcased rows of large, shiny steel bioreactors. However, journalists soon found out that Upside’s bioreactors were not actually working. Those large containers were not producing anything, especially not the advertised chicken fillets. Upside Foods was actually growing chicken skin cells in much smaller laboratory dishes. Thin layers of cells were then manually scraped and pressed into pieces of chicken. In other words, Upside was using a lot of labor, plastic, and energy to make this, if it can even be called meat.
