The Jetpack, the Segway, the Scooter, and the Litter Box: What Technology Is Actually For

Technology is often judged by how difficult it was to create. Artificial intelligence seems important because it is extraordinarily sophisticated. A jetpack is impressive because keeping a human flying through the air is an enormous engineering challenge. The Segway attracted tremendous attention because balancing a person dynamically on two wheels required remarkable sensors, software, motors, and control systems.

A self-cleaning cat litter box hardly seems to belong in the same conversation. But perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing. The important question about technology isn't how sophisticated it is. The more useful question is what problem it solves and how much value solving that problem creates for an actual beneficiary.

Consider four very different technologies: the jetpack, the Segway, the electric scooter, and Brad Baxter's Litter-Robot. Together, they illustrate four very different relationships between technological achievement and human value.

The Jetpack: An Extraordinary Solution Looking for a Problem

Humans have dreamed about personal flight for generations. Today, we can essentially do it. Modern turbine-powered jet suits allow a person to take off vertically, fly through the air, maneuver around obstacles, and land. Gravity Industries markets its jet suit for specialized defense and rescue applications, with reported performance of roughly three minutes of flight and speeds up to 60 mph.

That is an extraordinary technological achievement. But it immediately raises another question: what problem have we solved? For ordinary transportation, not much. If someone wants to travel five miles, we already have cars, motorcycles, bicycles, trains, buses, and electric bicycles and scooters. They are generally cheaper, safer, quieter, easier to operate, and much more practical.

There are specialized situations where a jet suit could create enormous value. A rescue worker might need to cross terrain that would otherwise require a long journey. A military operator might need to move rapidly between ships. In those situations, even three minutes of flight could matter enormously. Gravity Industries is pursuing exactly these kinds of applications. So the jetpack isn't useless. Its technological achievement is simply much greater than the size of the everyday human problem it currently solves. That distinction matters.

The Segway: A Real Problem, but the Wrong Solution

The Segway presents a different case. When Dean Kamen's Segway Personal Transporter appeared in 2001, expectations were extraordinary. Some early enthusiasts predicted that it could transform cities and personal transportation. The machine itself was genuinely remarkable. Sophisticated electronic controls continuously balanced a standing human on two wheels.

Unlike the jetpack, the Segway addressed a very real problem. People frequently need to travel distances that are inconvenient to walk but too short to justify taking a car. The problem wasn't imaginary. The Segway simply wasn't a particularly good general solution to it.

It was relatively expensive and bulky. Owners had to purchase it, store it, charge it, and figure out where they were permitted to ride it. Walking remained easier for very short distances, while bicycles were better for many longer ones.

The original Segway PT never produced the transportation revolution its promoters envisioned, and production of the iconic model ended in 2020. But the company and technology did not disappear. Segway-Ninebot subsequently became heavily involved in electric scooters and other forms of micromobility. That leads to the more interesting part of the story.

The Scooter: The Problem Was Real After All

Beginning around 2017, electric scooters suddenly appeared on sidewalks around the world. The early shared-scooter boom itself was excessive. Venture-backed companies deployed enormous numbers of scooters, competed aggressively for cities and customers, and often behaved as though simply putting more scooters on streets would inevitably create a gigantic business.

Much of that business model collapsed. But something important happened: the scooters didn't disappear. Lime provides a useful example. By 2026, it was operating in roughly 230 cities across 29 countries and had surpassed one billion cumulative trips. About 19 million people used its service during 2025. In July 2026, Lime went public after reporting 2025 revenue of about $887 million, up 30% from the previous year.

Those numbers don't prove that every scooter company or every scooter deployment makes economic sense. They demonstrate something more fundamental: millions of people actually want the service. The Segway had identified a real problem. The scooter found a better solution.

Suppose you need to travel eight blocks. Walking takes longer than you want. Driving requires finding the car, navigating traffic, and parking again. Public transportation may not follow the route you need.

With a shared scooter, you find one nearby, ride to your destination, leave it, and walk away. You don't have to own it, store it, transport it back home, or maintain it. The scooter is technologically far less impressive than the Segway. That may be exactly why it works.

Brad Baxter and the Cat Litter Problem

Now consider something even less glamorous. In the late 1990s, Brad Baxter acquired two cats. That meant he also acquired a problem familiar to millions of cat owners: someone has to clean the litter box.

Baxter, an engineer, decided there ought to be a better way. He licensed an existing patent, developed the concept further, and brought the first Litter-Robot to market in 2000. The device used gravity and rotation to separate waste automatically rather than requiring the owner to scoop the litter manually.

Compared with building a jetpack, this was a trivial technological challenge. Compared with inventing the Segway's balancing system, it wasn't particularly sophisticated. And unlike the scooter, it didn't require rethinking urban transportation.

It solved an extremely small problem. But it solved a real problem, repeatedly. A cat uses the litter box. Someone has to clean it. Then the cat uses it again. The process repeats thousands of times.

Automating one unpleasant five-minute task doesn't sound transformative. But if a machine saves several minutes a day for years, the cumulative benefit becomes substantial. Multiply that benefit across hundreds of thousands or millions of households and a seemingly trivial invention can create enormous aggregate value. That is technological innovation too.

Four Technologies, Four Different Outcomes

These examples reveal an important distinction. The jetpack represents extraordinary technology addressing a limited everyday problem. The Segway represents extraordinary technology addressing a real problem but offering a generally inferior solution. The electric scooter represents comparatively simple technology addressing the same real problem with a more practical solution. The self-cleaning litter box represents comparatively simple technology removing a small but persistent and unpleasant constraint from everyday life.

Technological sophistication and technological value should therefore be separated. A more useful chain is: Problem → Technology → Capability → Use → Beneficiary → Net Value Technology sits in the middle of that chain. The beneficiary sits at the end. And the end is what ultimately matters.

Markets Are Experiments

The scooter story adds another important lesson. A failed company doesn't necessarily indicate a failed technology. The original scooter startups may have been wrong about valuations, growth rates, deployment strategies, or how many scooters should be scattered across a particular city. But they could simultaneously have been right about something much more fundamental: people wanted inexpensive transportation for short trips.

The market conducted the experiment. Capital was lost. Companies disappeared. Business models changed. Cities imposed rules. Operators learned where vehicles were actually needed. The useful part survived. That is a powerful form of real-world evidence.

The Segway didn't become the dominant form of urban transportation. But the problem the Segway attempted to address didn't disappear. Eventually, a cheaper and simpler descendant found a much larger market. The failure of one solution should never be confused with the absence of a problem.

The Difficulty of a Problem Does Not Determine the Value of Solving It

This gives us a broader principle: the difficulty of solving a problem has no necessary relationship to the value of solving it. We naturally admire difficult technological accomplishments. That makes sense. Building a jetpack is vastly harder than building a litter box. But engineering achievement and beneficiary value are different measurements.

Imagine that engineers spend ten years and $500 million solving an extraordinarily difficult problem that benefits 1,000 people slightly. Someone else spends six months developing a simple device that saves ten minutes every day for ten million people. Which represents the greater technological contribution? If technology is ultimately a tool for increasing human value, the answer may be the second one.

AI Will Make This Distinction Much More Important

Artificial intelligence will make sophisticated technology progressively easier to create. AI can already write software, analyze enormous datasets, design components, simulate systems, generate alternatives, and assist humans in solving engineering problems. That means the constraint increasingly shifts. The question becomes less, "Can we build it?" and increasingly, "Should we build it?" More precisely: Does anyone actually need it?

AI will inevitably produce thousands of technological jetpacks: extraordinary demonstrations of capability that solve problems of little importance. It will also produce Segways: sophisticated answers to genuine problems that turn out to be inferior to simpler alternatives.

Hopefully, it will produce many more scooters and litter boxes: technologies that identify an actual constraint and remove it efficiently. That may be one of the most important distinctions for DataUniversa when evaluating technological progress.

We should not simply count inventions, patents, lines of code, computing power, research spending, AI models, or technological complexity. We should look downstream. What changed for the beneficiary?

Technology Is Successful When the Problem Disappears

There is something revealing about Baxter's litter box. Nobody watches one operate and thinks humanity has entered a new technological era. That is probably a compliment. The best technology frequently becomes invisible.

The washing machine removed hours of manual washing. The refrigerator reduced the constant problem of food preservation. The electric starter eliminated hand-cranking automobiles. Automatic transmissions removed another task from driving.

None requires its user to understand the engineering. They simply make a constraint disappear. The jetpack asks, "Can we make a human fly?" The Segway asks, "Can we build a revolutionary machine for short-distance transportation?" The scooter asks, "Can we get this person eight blocks more conveniently than the alternatives?"

And Baxter's litter box asks, "Why is someone still scooping this by hand?" The first question produces the most spectacular demonstration. The last may represent the better instinct for technological innovation. As technology becomes increasingly powerful, particularly through AI, we will have an unprecedented ability to build things.

That makes it increasingly important to remember that building things isn't the objective. Removing real constraints and creating value for real beneficiaries is. Sometimes that means artificial intelligence. Sometimes it means human flight. And sometimes progress is simply noticing that someone is still scooping the litter box and asking why.