Two lawsuits circulating this week share a skeleton beneath their very different flesh. Rivian owners are suing over hands-free driving features that were promised for years and never delivered to first-generation R1 vehicles. And the trending Florida IVF embryo mix-up case involves a different kind of broken promise: a medical-technological system that was supposed to be precise and wasn't. Both cases are fundamentally about the gap between what a technology's marketing implied and what reality produced.

The Promissory Economy of Emerging Tech

Rivian's case is a textbook example of what legal scholars call promissory estoppel applied to product roadmaps. EV and autonomous vehicle companies routinely market future software capabilities as purchase-time features, banking on the assumption that over-the-air updates will eventually make good on the pitch. When they don't, the liability question gets complicated: is a software promise a contract? The Rivian plaintiffs say yes. This is not unique to cars. The entire tech sector runs on a promissory economy where the product you buy is understood to be a down payment on the product you were sold.

When Precision Systems Fail Personal Stakes

The IVF case operates on different terrain but the same logic. Reproductive technology is marketed to patients on the premise of precision, of biological certainty in a domain where certainty is the entire emotional value proposition. When that precision fails, the stakes are not financial but existential. The biological parents described as 'heartbroken' were not just let down by a product. They were let down by the promise of a future that a technology claimed to make deterministic. Both Rivian drivers and IVF patients bought into systems that promised to remove uncertainty, and both found that the uncertainty was merely deferred. Eugenia Kuyda's framing of software as something you raise rather than deploy feels newly relevant here: when we treat technology as a static promise rather than a living, evolving relationship, the betrayal is baked in from the start.