Though the implementation is very simple. I did worse shit on my 2006’s Lego Mindstorms than comparing two sound sensors and drive to the source. I was a child then.
Grassroot efforts at building things for improving the lives of the disabled has been done, although there are reasons for why they don’t get as much exposure. Reading about your Lego Mindstorms project made me think of what people were doing in early 90s Cuba.
When the Soviets left, Cubans relied on things like Olivo Verde (I think it was called, translated to Green Olive), a couple of books encouraged by Che Guevara to reuse items for all sorts of things. Some of those things included motorised wheelchairs for some folks to get around.
There is a website I believe named after one of those Cuban projects, the Rikimbili, which outlines a lot of the stuff.
Link: www.ernestooroza.com/rikimbili/ (there is more on that site).
That’s the kind of thing we get when we hit the diminishing returns of innovation in some areas, but our economical system pushes companies into constantly innovating to stay afloat.
Many of the best discoveries and inventions were accidental or not immediately obviously great. So, pointless products aside, that is actually one of the good parts of capitalism. When there is no incentive for innovation, innovation can stall.
I agree that incentivizing innovation is a good thing, but when it becomes a pressure, we tend to get less innovative ideas, and more wasteful stuff, planned obsolescence, and even loss of functionality. It’s like a system going overshoot and distorting itself in a destructive manner, instead of building more over it. Some examples come to mind, like manufacturers adding iot to appliances that don’t need it, sites redesigning their layout every couple years to add nothing new at all, confuse the user base and become more resource intensive, new windows versions bringing heavy incompatibilities, but barely any new features, google worsening the results of their perfectly functional search engine that billions of people use daily, just to add some mandatory ai stuff that could have been optional, etc.
Yes, it without innovation, they are at risk of a competitor overtaking them by being innovative. Some of the examples you give are the opposite. They are mknetisstion of captured markets.
In the 80s and 90s, it was the same. Except instead of adding iot, they would add a small digital clock. To pencils, cases, bags, fridges etc. For some, like microwaves, it stuck. For others it didn’t.
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