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Tech’s most Dubious Promises, from Bill Gates To Elon Musk

by Sherrill Lazarev (2025-09-30)

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Are Herbal Brain Booster Supplements Effective To Improve Focus And Concentration?Last week, Elon Musk dashed off 125 characters announcing a remarkably bold plan to send Amtrak to an early grave. "Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to construct an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins," he proclaimed in a tweet. Ricki Harris is Backchannel’s editorial fellow. Sign as much as get Backchannel's weekly publication. Yet something about this explicit moonshot appeared off. To begin with, "verbal authorities approval," as politicos noted, doesn’t really exist. Receiving precise approval for a multibillion-greenback nationwide transportation system would require fairly just a few things: a stamp of approval from the Department of Transportation, Mind Guard testimonials agreements from and between the native governments for all cities involved, a plan for navigating rules, permits, and, final but not certainly not least, the money. We also needs to point out that-oh, yeah-Musk’s a lot-lauded hyperloop expertise doesn’t really exist but. But Musk’s declaration is just the most recent too-good-to-be-true pledge from the tech world. In the business of innovation, unfulfilled guarantees have a protracted historical past.



Christmas Sales 2016 - Bulletproof Year-End DealsFor decades, Silicon Valley has been imagining the future and pitching it to us because the definitive image of tomorrow. Musk himself is accountable for various outlandish promises-like his plan to beat extinction and bring one million folks to Mars, or his talk of a suborbital spaceship that, by 2020, will make most locations on Earth no more than 25 minutes away. Yet these titans are remarkably quiet in the case of part two of a sky-high promise: really making it occur. In most industries, unachievable guarantees are a sign of bad leadership. But in tech, the place corporations are built on inconceivable concepts, unreasonable pledges are just a part of doing business. It’s even written into the Valley's unofficial motto: Fail fast, fail often. But why do our best and brightest get away with overly optimistic claims that fail to materialize, time and time again? To put this latest instance of hoopla into perspective, we’ve compiled a list of the bold guarantees on which we’re still waiting for Silicon Valley to deliver.



Promise: Junk mail getting you down? Fear not. "Two years from now, spam shall be solved," Bill Gates assured participants on the World Economics Forum. Only one downside: He made that promise in 2004. On the time, Gates had a few concepts for how to stamp out laptop-aided mass mailers: memory and focus supplement a puzzle that might solely be solved by a human, a computational puzzle that only a pc sending a small variety of emails could handle, or hitting spam senders with a payment. Reality: Go ahead, check your inbox. Within the thirteen years since we had been promised a spam-free life, other companies have stepped in and attempted to make good the place Gates did not. Promise: In 2012, former Stanford laptop science professor Sebastian Thrun assured the world that we were overdue for the next training culling. After he attracted 100,000 college students to his experimental on-line course at Stanford, best brain health supplement Thrun left that submit to found the online schooling startup Udacity, the place he sought to supply a reasonable, excessive-quality school training to anybody with an web connection.



In 50 years, he told WIRED, there could be only 10 institutions on this planet delivering higher schooling-and brain booster supplement Udacity may very well be one among them. Say goodbye to school loans: MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) were the long run. Reality: MOOCs are nonetheless round, however they’re hardly dominating the higher education scene. The first drawback: MOOCs, which frequently partner with elite universities, rely heavily on the prestige of the identical establishments that their proponents declare are antiquated. The supposed MOOC revolution has additionally didn't take under consideration the social advantages of attending faculty outdoors of your dwelling room. In 2015, the Daily Dot famous that only 15 % of enrolled college students accomplished their MOOC levels, and that the vast majority of those enrolled already had college degrees. Today, MOOCs are extra commonly viewed as a brain booster supplement to a conventional faculty education, reasonably than a substitute. Promise: One 12 months after the Windows ninety five craze, Oracle released the computer that was purported to unseat Microsoft. The Network Computer was a easy, relatively cheap machine that stored knowledge online, eliminating the necessity for a massive hard drive. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison considered the no-frills Network Computer as the first step in driving down the associated fee and complexity of family computer systems. "We think these machines will dramatically outsell Windows in a short time period," Ellison advised the Mercury News at the time. Reality: brain booster supplement Four years and $175 million dollars later, Oracle referred to as it quits. From a enterprise perspective, the NC was an indisputable product failure. But from an trade perspective, Ellison was onto one thing. As he predicted and brain booster supplement as we now know, the market was ultimately flooded with cheaper, less complicated computers that chipped away at Microsoft’s monopoly. Promise: In December of 2001, Dean Kamen unveiled his masterpiece-the Segway-a mode of transportation that the inventor assured us was the next step in the transit revolution.



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