The Biggest Technology Failures of 2018
From gene-edited babies to guaranteed-fatal brain uploads, it was a bumper year for technology misfires and misuses
By Antonio Regalado
It was the year that technology — and the people who create it — seemingly could do no right, and did much that was wrong. As one of my sources put it in a tweet reacting to a dumb tech stunt, “2018 can’t end soon enough.”
For the past few years MIT Technology Review has published a list of what we consider the most pointless or destructive uses of technology (here are 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). This year, though, the naughty were naughtier and the wrongs seemed wronger: technology was used to spread hate and addiction, to justify suicide, and to experiment on newborn children. Here’s our list of the very worst.
CRISPR Babies
We all knew that gene-edited humans would one day be born, but nobody wanted it to happen so soon, and definitely not like this. In November, MIT Technology Review reported that He Jiankui, a scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen…
