Not all ideas can be hits. Alongside ground-breaking innovations, 21st-century scientists have helmed their share of wild tech flops, dubious theories and overhyped breakthroughs. Here are the biggest to forget.
The metaverse
If you don’t know what the metaverse is (no judgment because it was horribly sold), it was a word that Mark Zuckerberg and roughly four other people used to describe loosely connected immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), open-world gaming, digital avatars and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The internet 3.0, if you will.
Zuckerberg imagined a terribly animated dystopia where we could work and socialise on a hybrid plane of semi-digital existence.
We would have avatars to attend meetings for us, but for some reason, they wouldn’t have legs. You could buy a mansion made of pixels, not bricks. Pop-up notifications would bombard our retinas via AR glasses that superimposed online content over the real world. And thanks to VR, we could do anything or go anywhere simply by strapping a heavy, sweat-inducing computer to our faces.
Some of these technologies are still fighting for life, but many have faded from relevance or completely stalled.
Zuckerberg’s VR branch has now lost a staggering $58bn (£46bn) since 2020. Don’t expect those losses to be a blip – a survey of 624 tech experts found that nearly half believe the metaverse won’t play a major role in our lives, even by 2040.
Hyperloop
From an engineering perspective, hyperloop is a bold, world-changing form of transport – if only someone could get it to work. The idea is to encase people and cargo in a steel tube, then propel them with magnets through a near-vacuum at 1,000km/h (about 600mph), hopefully without rearranging anyone’s internal organs.
Elon Musk wrote a white paper on the concept in 2013 and multiple start-ups and test tracks have since been built around the world. Critics say Musk vastly oversimplified the construction and infrastructure work required to make hyperloop a reality.
Some even claim he only proposed it to shut down high-speed rail proposals to the benefit of his electric car company, Tesla.
Whatever the truth, a Dutch hyperloop company conducted its first test in autumn 2024. Top speed: 30km/h (19mph).
Fingerstick blood testing... for cancer
Think big, fail fast. Silicon Valley’s unofficial motto works well if you’re building another social media platform or the next big thing in blockchain-powered fintech management software (is that a thing? We think that’s a thing). When ‘Big Tech’ gets into the health space, however, lives are at stake.
The biggest cautionary tale comes from Theranos, a company that claimed to have invented a blood test that would change the world. It was called Edison – a handheld laboratory that could detect over 200 diseases, cancer included, from a tiny amount of blood extracted from a finger.
Spoiler: it absolutely couldn’t.
At its peak, Theranos was valued at $9bn (£7.1bn). Its founder, Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes, was feted as the youngest self-made billionaire in history. Eventually, whistleblowers came forward, followed by federal investigators. They found that Edison produced unreliable results.
One patient was told they were HIV positive when they weren’t. Another was told she had miscarried when she hadn’t. There were also multiple false diagnoses of cancer and diabetes. By the end of 2022, Holmes and her partner Ramesh Balwani had received a prognosis of their very own: 11 and 12 years in jail, respectively.
3D-printed guns
When 3D printers for playing around with at home first hit the market, our minds all leapt to Star Trek’s replicators. We dreamed of machines that could materialise tea, Earl Grey, hot – cup and all.
Sadly, about five minutes into the 3D-printing-at-home craze, some bright spark created a set of instructions that could print a gun. And just like that, our future looked less like Star Trek and more like The Terminator.
The like button
We could debate the pros and cons of social media all day until we hate each other, but… well, that’s what social media is for. Surely one thing we can agree on, however, is the like button. Bad idea. Terrible.
As well as creating a new form of social currency that kept us addicted to our phones and needy for the button-press of strangers, it also became a gateway through which ‘Big Tech’ algorithms understood us.
In 2015, psychologist Prof Michal Kosinski found that, armed only with a person’s Facebook likes, a computer model could predict that person’s personality better than their family or friends could. Where’s the thumbs-down button for this idea?
Read more:
- How to beat anxiety: 8 simple, concrete strategies to take control of your mind
- 44 cool gadgets: Our pick of the best new tech for 2025
- The 10 weirdest gadgets millionaires are set to buy this year
Microbeads
Patents go back to the 1960s, but it was in the early 2000s that microbeads (plastic spheres less than 1mm across) became prevalent in our soaps, toothpastes and practically every other cosmetic. All the better for whiter teeth and smoother skin.
Of course, they were an environmental disaster.
Too small to be filtered by sewage systems, they washed out to sea and into the food chain before bans started to roll in from 2014. We probably swallowed them too.
In recent years, microplastics have been found in human brains, lungs, testes and other organs, although to be fair, those could also have come from car tyres, coffee pods, food packaging or any number of other sources.
Segway
The Segway was supposed to do for cars what cars did for horses, a revolution in transport that investors claimed would be bigger than the internet. It didn’t work out like that.
The company vastly overestimated our appetite for two-wheeled ‘personal transporters’ and didn’t even get them certified for road use in a lot of places. Lazy tourists still use them in some cities, but let’s be honest, everyone looks a little tragic on a Segway.
None more so than British businessman Jimi Heselden, who bought Segway Inc. in 2009. He died a year later, reversing one off a cliff.
Overprescribing opioids
“What’s that, you’re having some moderate discomfort? Here, have a bottle of wildly addictive tablets and we’ll see you again when you overdose.” We’re reasonably certain that no doctor has ever said those exact words, but some of them might as well have.
Between 1998 and 2016 opioid prescriptions in England increased by 127 per cent, according to The Lancet. A sharper rise has been seen in the US, where an estimated 17 per cent of the population have filed at least one opioid prescription.
It’s also a global trend. Researchers estimate that 60 million people are battling the addictive effects of opioids. Close to 80 per cent of the world’s deaths due to drugs were related to opioid use.
Overprescription isn’t the only factor, but public health experts agree that it’s a big one. Egged on by salespeople from ‘Big Pharma’, physicians spent the early 21st century handing out high-strength painkillers like they were plasters. The result? A deeply upsetting wound in our collective medical records.
NFT art
Are rich people okay? This was the question asked in 2021, when NFT artworks started selling for millions.
‘Non-fungible tokens’ are unique digital assets stored on a digital ledger called a blockchain. To outsiders, buying them looked like people were paying Lamborghini prices for JPEGs.
The most infamous NFT project was the Bored Ape Yacht Club, valued at $4bn (£3.2bn) at its peak in 2022. By 2023, the floor price had collapsed by 88 per cent. That doesn’t mean now is a good time to invest. In 2024, analysts claimed that 96 per cent of all NFT collections were effectively dead.
Loot boxes
According to a paper from Harvard Business School, gamers spend $15bn (£11.8bn) a year on loot boxes. These collectable in-game tokens give your character a cooler outfit or a weapon that will smite your enemies more brutally and efficiently. All good fun.
Except, for many players, in-game purchases have ruined the experience. Critics say that high-profile console and mobile games are now designed to maximise loot box revenue at the expense of playability.
To advance in many games, you have to keep spending. This pay-to-win model is often compared to gambling and can encourage addictive behaviours in young gamers. We’d rather KO this custom.
Google Glass
It’s funny, isn’t it, how many so-called smart products are designed with the bare minimum of common sense. Google Glass may be the ultimate example, the head-mounted wearable lasting all of two years on the market before being discontinued.
It looked like something from Star Trek. The device had a tiny display that put the internet just millimetres from your eyeball, so you could access sweet, sweet content at any moment.
Finally, you could take a scenic walk while reading your inbox hands-free. Or scroll social media while visiting your grandmother, updating her in real time on the latest celebrity divorces. She’d love that.
Google Glass also included a camera to record Nana’s reaction, but also everything and everyone, all the time. It gave us the creeps just as much as it gave privacy campaigners an open goal the size of the Grand Canyon. Google halted production in 2015, but recently a slew of new, but no-less-creepy, prototypes have emerged.
Health halo food labels
A weird paradox of the 21st century is that while people are more health-conscious than ever, our diets now include more unhealthy and processed foods than at any point in history.
In the US, for instance, ultra-processed foods account for more than half of all calories consumed. Meanwhile, food labels are stuffed with buzzwords that make products seem healthier than they actually are.
A box of granola may be ‘organic’, but it could still pack enough sugar to make your eyeballs hum. A ‘high-protein’ ready meal might also be swimming in trans fats. And that loaf of ‘multi-grain’ bread sounds good, but if it’s made with refined grains, then much of the fibre and many of the nutrients will be stripped away during production.
You’ll also find plant-based foods labelled ‘cholesterol-free’ when, in truth, all plant-based foods are cholesterol-free.
This effect works the other way, too. Most scientists believe genetically modified foods have incredible potential for public health, but many consumers are put off by the label. Meanwhile, foods splashed with vapid, unscientific labels are regularly sold as health foods.
Oh, it’s ‘100-per-cent natural’, you say? Great. So is arsenic.
Power posing
Chest out, shoulders back, chin up. The flaky field of body language was supercharged in 2010 when researchers from Harvard and Columbia found that certain poses make us feel more powerful and in control.
Not only that, the right ‘expansive’ poses – such as reclining with your hands behind your head – could reduce stress hormones and increase testosterone.
The idea caught on quickly. Peacocking CEOs strutted around the board room and people questioned why politicians were delivering speeches while standing like a superhero.
Five years later, power posing lost a lot of its presence when researchers realised that some of the results of the original study couldn’t be replicated. In fact, confidence in the whole field of social psychology was faltering in what has since become known as ‘The Replication Crisis’.
Still, we’re sure it’s nothing a strong handshake couldn’t sort out.
Mars One
Wanted: 40 brave souls to build the first human colony on Mars. The year was 2011 and Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp had a dream to send human beings to the Red Planet. The catch? Mars One would be a one-way trip.
That didn’t seem to put people off, neither did Lansdorp’s plan to fund your slow death in part with a Big Brother-style reality TV show.
Scientists and aerospace engineers were aghast, and listed serious misgivings about hardware, logistics and the health of astronauts. They needn’t have worried. Mars One went bankrupt in 2019.
Facebook running experiments on us
The big tech firms that emerged in the noughties gathered more personal information on their users than any corporation in history, and not always with our best interests at heart.
Case in point, in 2014, Facebook – early motto: move fast and break things – ran an experiment on 700,000 users without their knowledge.
The delightfully Orwellian study aimed to manipulate people’s emotions by controlling what turned up in their news feeds. Beyond privacy concerns, critics slammed social media’s ability to choreograph people’s moods and influence their political opinions. Facebook (now Meta) apologised though, so no harm done.
Overpromises
The early 21st century has been a time of fast and giddy discovery across many fields of research. But, like all Homo sapiens, scientists are sometimes guilty of getting ahead of themselves.
This century alone, we’ve been promised warp drives and cold fusion, personalised medicine and tepid semiconductors. And every time there’s the smallest breakthrough, researchers say the world-changing development will be with us in five-to-ten years.
It’s always five-to-ten years. Maybe they just say that to make sure the research keeps getting funding. Still… better get a move on. The 22nd century is only 75 short years away.
Geoengineering
Such is the scale of the climate crisis that rational scientists think it might be a good idea to spray aerosols into the upper atmosphere to bounce sunlight back into space. Others plan to cover deserts and glaciers with some kind of sheeting. There are also proposals to meddle with the weather or boost the oceans’ alkalinity.
Pretty much every geoengineering plan is controversial, their results uncertain and their side effects unknown. But, you know… nothing ventured, nothing gained. Climate talks are failing and decarbonisation is too slow. Might as well shoot for the Moon, eh, folks?
In the words of the American writer Eli Kintisch, geoengineering is a bad idea whose time has come.
Read more:
