CES: Consumer Excess Show
Each year tech nerds from around the globe converge on Sin City for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to get first looks at the near future of gizmos. Walking the floor of the expo, you’re surrounded by some truly incredible tech that will certainly enhance our lives. Conversely, you can also stumble onto some earnest tech that ranges from unnecessary to downright terrifying. Here’s a collection of some of the most absurd technologies from CES 2018.
Robot Strippers
CES isn’t just a straight-laced trade show. There are tons of corporate-sponsored parties and after-hours events that allow attendees to partake in some of the more leisure-focused offerings of Las Vegas. Most of these events entice party-goers with promises of access to big names in tech or with free food and drink. Others might go a little overboard with their PR stunts. This year, that honor (or shame) is bestowed upon Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club and their creepy Orwellian robot strippers.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, these bots are less Pris and Zhora from Blade Runner and more like a scintillating pair of gyrating fax machines. The website of Sapphire Las Vegas invited patrons to “Come watch sparks fly as the Robo Twins shake their hardware and leave everyone wondering if those double Ds are real or made in ‘Silicone’ Valley.” How charming.
However, it seems that the organizers of this spectacle completely missed the point of these particular robots. The artist who built the bots, Giles Walker, said that he was influenced by the increasing numbers of CCTV cameras which made him want to explore voyeurism and turn that on its head by making the cameras themselves “sexy.”
Weight-Loss Brain Zapper
Weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry filled with fads and endless gimmicks promising to not only help you lose weight but to do it with the least amount of effort from you. Usually, when a weight loss product sounds too good to be true, it likely is. This brings us to the second of CES’s absurd technologies, the allegedly headache-inducing headset from Modius Health.
The plastic headset features two dangling electrodes that you attach to pads that you stick behind your ears. The headset is said to send electrical signals to your hypothalamus, the hypothesis being that stimulating the hypothalamus makes you want to eat less.
The company’s website has a “science” section where it touts the results of a study. However, the study only included 15 people over the course of 16 weeks. Neuroscientist, Sandra Aamodt, told The Verge, “I can say with confidence that they haven’t tested it carefully enough to prove that it does work. If someone approached the FDA for approval of a weight-loss drug based on evidence like this, they’d be laughed out of the building.”...MORE
