Zuckerberg and Musk need to answer a question: what’s the point of tech?

As the sun rose on the west coast on Tuesday, before the wildfires began, and as Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement that could change the political landscape forever, an army of robots were preparing to trundle around a Las Vegas hotel. Massage robots, pool cleaning robots, exoskeleton robots, backflipping robot dogs; they had assembled from around the world to demonstrate the future.

They were in Las Vegas – alongside some 140,000 actual people from the tech industry – for the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, probably the world’s most important tech conference. Technology companies bring their latest offerings in an attempt to excite the world and its buyers, showing off everything from new products to speculative concepts. Now nearly 60 years old, CES has served as the introduction of many of the world’s most famous tech products: the first CD player, for instance, and everything from Pong to the Xbox.

In recent years, however, the genuinely exciting products have been joined by an array of solutions to non-existing problems, and a dazzling array of tech for tech’s sake. Increasingly, and this year with clear certainty, the show has become about something more important: the question of what technology actually is for…

Story continues

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

TRENDING ARTICLES