The 8 worst technology failures of 2024

They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology.

1. Woke AI blunder.  People worry about bias creeping into AI. But what if you add bias on purpose? Thanks to Google, we know where that leads: Black Vikings and female popes.  Google’s Gemini AI image feature, launched last February, had been tuned to zealously showcase diversity, damn the history books. Ask Google for a picture of German soldiers from World War II, and it would create a Benetton ad in Wehrmacht uniforms. Critics pounced and Google beat an embarrassed retreat. 
2. Boeing Starliner.  Boeing, we have a problem. And it’s your long-delayed reusable spaceship, the Starliner, which stranded NASA’s 2 astronauts on the International Space Station.  The June mission was meant to be a quick eight-day round trip to test Starliner before it embarked on longer missions. But, plagued by helium leaks and thruster problems, it had to come back empty. Now the astronaus won’t return to Earth until 2025, when a craft from Boeing competitor SpaceX is scheduled to bring them home. But this wasn’t Boeing’s only malfunction during 2024.
3. CrowdStrike outage.  The motto of the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is “We stop breaches.” And it’s true: No one can breach your computer if you can’t turn it on.  That’s exactly what happened to many people on July 19, when thousands of Windows computers at airlines, TV stations, and hospitals started displaying the “blue screen of death.”   The cause wasn’t hackers or ransomware. Instead, those computers were stuck in a boot loop because of a bad update shipped by CrowdStrike itself.
4. Vertical farms.  Grow lettuce in buildings using robots, hydroponics, and LED lights. That’s what Bowery, a “vertical farming” startup, raised over $700 million to do. But in November, Bowery went bust, making it the biggest startup failure of the year, according to the business analytics firm CB Insights.  Bowery claimed that vertical farms were “100 times more productive” per square foot than traditional farms, since racks of plants could be stacked 40 feet high. In reality, the company’s lettuce was more expensive, and when a stubborn plant infection spread through its East Coast facilities, Bowery had trouble delivering the green stuff at any price.
5. Exploding pagers.  They beeped, and then they blew up. Across Lebanon, fingers and faces were shredded in what was called Israel’s “surprise opening blow in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah.”  The deadly attack was diabolically clever. Israel set up shell companies that sold thousands of pagers packed with explosives to the Islamic faction, which was already worried that its phones were being spied on.  A coup for Israel’s spies. But was it a war crime? A 1996 treaty prohibits intentionally manufacturing “apparently harmless objects” designed to explode. The New York Times says nine-year-old Fatima Abdullah died when her father’s booby-trapped beeper chimed and she raced to take it to him.
6. 23andMe.  The company that pioneered direct-to-consumer gene testing is sinking fast. Its stock price is going toward zero, and a plan to create valuable drugs is kaput after that team got pink slips this November.  Customers are starting to worry about what’s going to happen to their DNA data if 23andMe goes under.  23andMe says it created “the world’s largest crowdsourced platform for genetic research.” That’s true. It just never figured out how to turn a profit. 

The other two are: AI slop, and Voluntary carbon markets.