11th January 2025
We've been to a couple of restaurants that now 'employ' robotic waiters. Rather than being an aid to the human staff, they seemed to cause more problems than they solved. They got stuck or confused so often that the staff often ended up switching them to a mode that allowed them to be pushed around, like expensive, over-engineered trolleys. Their one redeeming feature was that they supplied an evening's entertainment for our son who enjoyed following them around, stalking them like oblivious, slow-moving prey.
Welcome to The Swamp of Negative Utility. That is, the period when a new technology is introduced, before all the kinks are ironed out, resulting in - at least to begin with - a worse experience than what was available before the technology existed.
Another example is the driver "aids" in my car, the most egregious being the collision detection system. This uses the front parking sensors to detect and warn of an impending collision. Unfortunately, the system is either overly sensitive, or suffers from periodic hallucinations, causing alerts for no apparent reason. The biggest problem with this is in how the alerts are communicated; the system emits a loud beeping noise and the dashboard lights up red, displaying the word BRAKE. This has the rather undesirable effect of making me take my eyes off the road at the worst possible moment, when a collision may in fact be imminent. Having a faulty system is worse than not having it at all.
In the past, these were the sorts of issues that would have been experienced by early adopters, people whose enthusiasm for new technology means they are more accepting of teething issues. However, companies are so desperate to exploit any possible advantage they can to get a lead on their competitors, they will add them to the standard models before they are really ready.
Things change once we cross the swamp and reach the other side, when a technology becomes more useful and the pros outweigh the cons. The most obvious example of this is the motor-car. The first cars were slow, expensive, unreliable, unsafe and couldn't travel very far, they were less effective than the thing they were designed to replace - horses. Of course, we know how this story ended for the horses. Once many of those initial problems had been worked out they far surpassed the trusty steeds that had served us for thousands of years.
