We prefer to suppose there’s a lesson in each technological misadventure. However when know-how turns into depending on energy, generally the takeaway is less complicated: it might have been higher to remain away.
That was a conclusion Elon Musk drew from his sojourn as instigator of DOGE, the rebel cost-cutting initiative that took a chainsaw to federal companies. The general public protested. Teslas had been set alight, and drivers of his hyped Cybertruck found that as an alternative of a thumbs-up, they had been getting the center finger.
On reflection, Musk mentioned he wouldn’t do it once more. “As a substitute of doing DOGE, I might have, principally … labored on my corporations,” he instructed an interviewer this month. “And so they wouldn’t have been burning the automobiles.”
Regrets—2025 had a couple of. Listed here are among the extra notable ones.
NEO, the house robotic
1X TECH
Think about a steel butler that fills your dishwasher and opens the door. It’s a dream straight out of science fiction. And it’s going to stay there—a minimum of for some time.
That was the hilarious, and deflating, takeaway from the primary evaluations of NEO, a 66-pound humanoid robotic whose maker claims it can “deal with any of your chores reliably” when it ships subsequent yr.
However as a reporter for the Wall Road Journal discovered, NEO took two minutes to fold a sweater and couldn’t crack a walnut. Not solely that, however the robotic was teleoperated the complete time by an individual carrying a VR visor.
