Technology will set us free... or it will if you believe the hype. Back in the early days of science fiction we were being promised that in the next century - this one - robots that would be helping us around the house, regular flights would be taking off for holidays in the lunar colonies, and disease would be an interesting footnote to the previous century.

Things haven't quite worked out that way, as anyone who has witnessed their computer collapse into a blue screen of death¹ will confirm, but we've still seen some amazing things - the Internet, vaccines and decaffeinated coffee, to name but three.

But what about the inventions that don't quite make it? The applications of technology that, no matter how glossy the sales talk, simply boggle the mind with their stupidity? Douglas Adams' books are full of wonderful ideas that turned out to be infuriating - ship computers with personality defects, depressed androids, drinks machines that couldn't produce drinkable drinks, and anything else invented by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation - but real life is full of them too.

So join in the conversation below and tell the world about inventions that were supposed to be useful, but which frankly turned out to be totally useless. Perhaps they'll finally manage to provide an important function - to make us all laugh!