Technology has had to save us for almost a year. A pandemic is sweeping the world, there have been dire forest fires, troubled political times and the airy miasm of social media wafts through our lives. 2020 has shown more clearly than ever how technical innovations can help us, but also hurt us at the same time.

The COVID – 19 -Call vaccines. At this point, however, it should not be about such successes – but rather a review of the last year’s worst technology flops. Also on the balance sheet: Billions in digital business plans that crash landed, COVID tests that went wrong and the unpredictable consequences for a planet wrapped in cheap satellites.

Incorrect COVID tests The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is not a new technique. In fact, the method to detect the presence of certain genes in a sample had already been developed 1980 and its developer received the Nobel Prize a decade later. It is used in a large number of diagnostic tests, as well as in laboratory research. So it can be seen as a mess of historical proportions that at the beginning of the COVID – 19 – pandemic those laboratories of the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which specialize in PCR testing, have sent kits to states that contained the wrong ingredients called primers. They didn’t work.

And so it started: The CDC failed to stop the pathogen in the first wave. The country where the PCR technique was invented failed to adequately carry out corona tests for weeks. According to economists, extensive and frequent testing would have offered the fastest and cheapest way to keep the country running economically. Even now, less than a year later, queues and delays are still test normal in the U.S., even though private labs, universities, and health centers can perform an estimated two million tests a day.

Unregulated face recognition Imagine a surveillance video from a robbery in a shop. The robber looks into the camera and bang, the police identify the suspect using facial recognition. Now imagine a city – like Portland, Oregon – that decides: The police are no longer allowed to do that. The ability to recognize and match faces is one of the outstanding triumphs of a new generation of artificial intelligence. The technology is used everywhere. Even in places where it may seem excessive and illegal, such as schools or social housing facilities. 2020 Then the consequence: Many cities, states and companies introduced a series of bans and restrictions.

One reason this technology has accelerated so much is that we have cameras everywhere – and we all give out our selfies. “We unleashed the monster by feeding it millions of faces and we also tagged ourselves,” says Joseph Atick, who built an early face recognition system using special cameras and a custom image database. There are now hundreds of face recognition apps that process images online. The use of these systems is, according to Atick, “no longer a technical problem”.

Last summer, both Microsoft and Amazon denied the police access to their face-matching systems, at least temporarily. Cities like Portland have enforced sweeping bans that have also prevented hotels and businesses from identifying people. There is still no national framework in the USA that differentiates between permitted and prohibited use. Instead of a vicious circle of abuse on the one hand and prohibitions on the other, legal provisions are required. Quibis faster collapse “Quick bites. Great stories.” That was the motto of Quibi, a Hollywood-powered streaming service that launched in April. He should revolutionize the entertainment industry with 10 – minute shows for cell phone screens. But the story ended in Quibi’s rapid decline. Six months after its debut, the company was already firing employees and giving the remainder of its 1.4 billion euro budget back to investors.

The misfire was reminiscent of the infamous project of important American news websites in the year 2018 when they hired tons of reporters to produce super-short text-on-screen videos because they wanted to place this advertisement before – just before it was next round of savings came. Similarly, Quibi worked with well-paid professionals to deliver clever content on a $ 5 subscription model to keep up with YouTube, TikTok, and hordes of creatives providing free cat movies and dance moves.