Robot is like furniture: when innovation doesn’t make life easier

The pace of technological progress leads to the emergence of “raw” products that require constant updating. At the same time, existing products, having lost support, suddenly become meaningless

Technological innovation is a complex process with many interconnections. The increasing speed of their implementation can lead to incidents: it often happens that a software update conflicts with the hardware, and developers are forced to quickly fix the shortcomings by publishing an extraordinary update.

It also happens that companies throw all their efforts into new projects, and at some point they simply stop supporting the old product, no matter how popular it may be. A striking example is the operating system (OS) Windows XP, which Microsoft stopped updating in the spring of 2014. True, the company extended the service period for this OS for ATMs, 95% of which worldwide used Windows XP, by two years to avoid financial collapse and give banks time to adapt.

“At some point, it turns out that “smart” devices get dumber, and automatic updates are no longer automatic,” writes ECT News Network columnist Peter Sachyu. Technologies that are presented as simple and understandable are often not so at all, and the path to simply pressing a button goes through solving several problems. Sachyu identifies six situations in which technological development and innovation make life far from easier.

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