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People have short memories. A few years ago hypes like big data and machine learning, blockchain and autonomous cars were pushed relentlessly. The consultants w

People have short memories. A few years ago hypes like big data and machine learning, blockchain and autonomous cars were pushed relentlessly. The consultants would confidently predict 300 gazillion profits by 2030, everybody would lose their job etc. Then the pandemic happened, momentarily some candid voices admitted that all this digi-crap does not help an iota with our quality of life (or life, period) but the digital WFH hype found just the right meme to sell. Then the pandemic receded but the LLM breakthrough was compiled just-in-time to rekindle the AGI hyperventilation... There is no respite. The tech economy is like the fabled sharks: needs to keep inventing hypes or it will implode.

demondemidi 3y ago
If I had a dime for every conference I went to from 20010-2015 that said "IoT will be a 20 trillion dollar market in 10 years", I'd be retired.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  I can't remember the name of the company, but they sponsor CPR(Colorado-area NPR affiliate), but they went from being "an IoT company", to "an IoT blockchain company", to an "IoT blockchain with AI" company.
  - josh_cutler 3y ago
    C3 IOT I'm guessing
    - asadotzler 3y ago
      This is the one. C3 IOT became C3 AI without batting a lash. The radio copy is almost identical, with only the name change to catch your ear or avoid sounding dated.
  - demondemidi 3y ago
    That is really funny. I wonder what it is like to be that audacious?
autokad 3y ago
I think you got your timeline a bit mixed up. the EV and blockchain craze happened during and BECAUSE of the pandemic. It was the rise of inflation that brought everything down starting in February of 2021. (yes, blockchain had a previous bubble, but that ended in 2018). This is why bitcoin and the nasdaq both peaked in December 2021. But those EV spacs were already in a world of hurt since Feb.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Nah, the hype cycle for both started a decade ago, long before the pandemic.
opportune 3y ago
Big data and AV were overhyped buzzwords at the time, but they’re both actual technology that are slowly reaching normalcy. Plenty of people are using Spark and Databricks, plenty of people are using more abstracted products like Bigquery. No, people developed the good sense not to try to run clusters of janky and poorly documented Apache big data software as if it were “free” (except in maintenance… and bugs… and lack of feature support…) but big data is absolutely a thing. It’s just lost its buzzwordiness in the same way Web 2.0 has. I’m actually surprised that the AV hype has died down so much because there are actual L5 AV products (Waymo, Cruise) regular people (in SF) can use now. We’re in like the original iPhone stage. They’re having their moment.
- indeedmug 3y ago
  The biggest lesson I took away from all of these hype cycles is how unpredictable they are in their arc. Some trends like AV seem like they were going to take over the world, but they died down as quickly as they rose when we realize how hard safety is. VR seem like it was dead with Google Glasses and Meta. But recent releases show that the [vision of VR is more real than I thought](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg). Apple releasing their VR definitely provides more legitimacy to the idea. Technology is always hard to actually implement in the real world. I think have expectations that the world would flip over with new innovations in a matter of months. But it actually takes years of hard work to get people to adopt it. The internet and mobile phones are good examples where the promise was clear but the journey being universally adopted was not easy. * * For the internet, you have the massive struggle of web standards, getting implementations web browser to align, and achieving acceptable performance. Internet Explorer still haunts the dreams of many web devs. It's remarkable how many fully featured web apps there are like Onshape and Google Maps. * For mobile phones, they require a massive amount of technology investment and unit economics to get the price cheap enough for normal people. It's amazing how wireless technology gotten to the point where we can stream videos on phones.
  - opportune 3y ago
    I think the time to value between the Internet’s hype cycle and real utility was relatively short compared to most other technology hype cycles, because it was like the OG computer hype cycle and so was naturally a bit more delayed than subsequent hype cycles that had as their rationale “better not miss out in case this as big as the Internet”. It only took about 5-10 years to go from the beginning of the bubble to the modern incarnation of the internet and early versions of the products that now underpin trillion dollar businesses. But, a lot of internet standards had been in the works for a long time at that point. Not so for AV and VR. I think we’re looking at 2+ decades for a lot of technology like that. It’s such a long time it really shakes out the hypemen with short attention spans.
raincole 3y ago
Yes because the past data is so good to predict the future. I guess technical analysis isn't that bad!
winternett 3y ago
In shot form -- The same people that heavily marketed Crypto and NFTs (Which didn't work as promised) are now the same people over-marketing deeply flawed Ai tools for monthly subscriptions. You can literally develop a front end for an Ai tool and connect it to a social media scraping back-end service in a day, and then hide it behind a subscription pay wall. This is what is driving the flood of tools right now, not well thought out and unique truly Artificial Intelligence-driven projects.
blackoil 3y ago
> momentarily some candid voices admitted that all this digi-crap does not help an iota with our quality of life User behavior was completely inverse, consumption for everything tech went through the roof. H/w for WFH and home schooling, Netflix++ for entertainment, everything ecommerce. Everything follows hype cycle. It is just that tech is moving so fast that you see new cycles every 5 years. But apart from crypto, everything has delivered.
adventured 3y ago
> The tech economy is like the fabled sharks: needs to keep inventing hypes or it will implode No, the tech economy wouldn't implode. It would just signal it had become an old, stable industry (eg automobiles). The so called tech economy isn't going away under any scenario, it underpins modern civilization across the globe, and that's only going to be more true in 20/30/50 years than it is already today. The tech economy is a thousand times larger than it was in the mid 1980s. Despite one hype cycle after another. If your premise were correct, it would have ended a long time ago because it would all just be hype and it would inevitably collapse in on itself. You've confused a necessary ingredient: venture capital investment, speculation, experimentation, some chaos, with thinking nothing good comes out of the process. The exact opposite is true, it's that very process that produces drastically more positive income and wealth than is destroyed in the inevitable pull-back of the hype cycle (whether it's gentle or a dotcom bubble style crash). Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this, if they have any awareness of the extraordinary size of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, Amazon, etc. versus the dotcom bubble days (for the equivalent style companies of the time), much less the 1980s. The global economy (as well as the US economy) is now drastically larger. If you produce a successful product, your outcome can quite easily be drastically larger accordingly. The global economy has expanded in a truly massive way over the last several decades, and the tech economy has gone with it. It's not riding on false hypes, generative AI and the like are a itsy bitsy tiny little corner of the present scale of the tech economy. Go take a look at Microsoft's operating income over the last 30 years and tell me what you see.
- nologic01 3y ago
  > Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this Well, we need to calibrate a baseline otherwise its just a waste of my precious minute. Digital tech as such, especially the hardware side is not a fluke. It evolves inexorably in capability, follows physical laws (e.g. the endless shrinking of transistor sizes has stopped) and is the tooling supporting a range of potentially long-term sustainable economic activities. This reality does not exactly fix the relative size of the tech economy to the rest of the economy, much less so in terms of market valuation (which is the driver for most the actors involved). There are various important factors that people simply assume are "normal" in the tech landscape but they are not. They are the result of arbitrary political decisions. 1) The degree of allowed concentration (monopolization) that essentially guarantees rent extraction and prohibits commoditization. 2) Lax attitudes towards data privacy that effectively simply siphon wealth from others. These two regulatory malfuctions could be reversed without much impact on the actual tech but a major impact on valuations. In fact the engineered hypes serve as much the need to keep inquiring minds at bay (by arguing now is not the time to stifle the exponential innovation) as they do to inflate stock options. Finally you have the fact that a certain fraction of "tech" is essentially disemboweling and substituting (rather than growing) other industries. For each triumphant Amazon type entity (that you seem to celebrate so much), you have the millions of boarded-up city bookstores and shops. This is a more complicated economic calculus. You could argue that all those vendors, publishers, taxi drivers, hoteliers etc should have been more proactive in adopting technology rather than have their lunch eaten. I would like to reverse the compliment and argue that it should take a person of any awareness less than a minute to grasp the rotten foundations on which quite a bit of the "tech economy" has built its edifice.
mrtksn 3y ago
> big data and ML Became a big thing after Amazon predicting someone is pregnant before they know it, hype died off after actual implementations predicted that people drink coffee in the morning. The hype died but those with actual use cases are using it. > blockchain Became a big thing after it made crypto millionaires, died off after people figured out that it doesn't help with anything other than gambling and illegal operations because its not better at anything that has an established legal infrastructure The hype died but people still need the gambling and hope to be rich on the next hype cycle by jumping on something like NFTs. > autonomous cars Tesla, although never delivered the thing they promise, it was able to propel them to the top as a car company. Now Tesla is a serious brand. Mercedes actually delivered autonomous driving car you can purchase and others actually were able to offer self driving taxi services but nobody seems to care that much. For some reason, Musk won this one without actually delivering it.

demondemidi 3y ago

If I had a dime for every conference I went to from 20010-2015 that said "IoT will be a 20 trillion dollar market in 10 years", I'd be retired.

oh_sigh 3y ago
I can't remember the name of the company, but they sponsor CPR(Colorado-area NPR affiliate), but they went from being "an IoT company", to "an IoT blockchain company", to an "IoT blockchain with AI" company.
- josh_cutler 3y ago
  C3 IOT I'm guessing
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    This is the one. C3 IOT became C3 AI without batting a lash. The radio copy is almost identical, with only the name change to catch your ear or avoid sounding dated.
- demondemidi 3y ago
  That is really funny. I wonder what it is like to be that audacious?

autokad 3y ago

I think you got your timeline a bit mixed up. the EV and blockchain craze happened during and BECAUSE of the pandemic. It was the rise of inflation that brought everything down starting in February of 2021. (yes, blockchain had a previous bubble, but that ended in 2018). This is why bitcoin and the nasdaq both peaked in December 2021. But those EV spacs were already in a world of hurt since Feb.

asadotzler 3y ago
Nah, the hype cycle for both started a decade ago, long before the pandemic.

opportune 3y ago

Big data and AV were overhyped buzzwords at the time, but they’re both actual technology that are slowly reaching normalcy. Plenty of people are using Spark and Databricks, plenty of people are using more abstracted products like Bigquery. No, people developed the good sense not to try to run clusters of janky and poorly documented Apache big data software as if it were “free” (except in maintenance… and bugs… and lack of feature support…) but big data is absolutely a thing. It’s just lost its buzzwordiness in the same way Web 2.0 has. I’m actually surprised that the AV hype has died down so much because there are actual L5 AV products (Waymo, Cruise) regular people (in SF) can use now. We’re in like the original iPhone stage. They’re having their moment.

indeedmug 3y ago
The biggest lesson I took away from all of these hype cycles is how unpredictable they are in their arc. Some trends like AV seem like they were going to take over the world, but they died down as quickly as they rose when we realize how hard safety is. VR seem like it was dead with Google Glasses and Meta. But recent releases show that the [vision of VR is more real than I thought](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg). Apple releasing their VR definitely provides more legitimacy to the idea. Technology is always hard to actually implement in the real world. I think have expectations that the world would flip over with new innovations in a matter of months. But it actually takes years of hard work to get people to adopt it. The internet and mobile phones are good examples where the promise was clear but the journey being universally adopted was not easy. * * For the internet, you have the massive struggle of web standards, getting implementations web browser to align, and achieving acceptable performance. Internet Explorer still haunts the dreams of many web devs. It's remarkable how many fully featured web apps there are like Onshape and Google Maps. * For mobile phones, they require a massive amount of technology investment and unit economics to get the price cheap enough for normal people. It's amazing how wireless technology gotten to the point where we can stream videos on phones.
- opportune 3y ago
  I think the time to value between the Internet’s hype cycle and real utility was relatively short compared to most other technology hype cycles, because it was like the OG computer hype cycle and so was naturally a bit more delayed than subsequent hype cycles that had as their rationale “better not miss out in case this as big as the Internet”. It only took about 5-10 years to go from the beginning of the bubble to the modern incarnation of the internet and early versions of the products that now underpin trillion dollar businesses. But, a lot of internet standards had been in the works for a long time at that point. Not so for AV and VR. I think we’re looking at 2+ decades for a lot of technology like that. It’s such a long time it really shakes out the hypemen with short attention spans.

raincole 3y ago

Yes because the past data is so good to predict the future. I guess technical analysis isn't that bad!

winternett 3y ago

In shot form -- The same people that heavily marketed Crypto and NFTs (Which didn't work as promised) are now the same people over-marketing deeply flawed Ai tools for monthly subscriptions. You can literally develop a front end for an Ai tool and connect it to a social media scraping back-end service in a day, and then hide it behind a subscription pay wall. This is what is driving the flood of tools right now, not well thought out and unique truly Artificial Intelligence-driven projects.

blackoil 3y ago

> momentarily some candid voices admitted that all this digi-crap does not help an iota with our quality of life User behavior was completely inverse, consumption for everything tech went through the roof. H/w for WFH and home schooling, Netflix++ for entertainment, everything ecommerce. Everything follows hype cycle. It is just that tech is moving so fast that you see new cycles every 5 years. But apart from crypto, everything has delivered.

adventured 3y ago

> The tech economy is like the fabled sharks: needs to keep inventing hypes or it will implode No, the tech economy wouldn't implode. It would just signal it had become an old, stable industry (eg automobiles). The so called tech economy isn't going away under any scenario, it underpins modern civilization across the globe, and that's only going to be more true in 20/30/50 years than it is already today. The tech economy is a thousand times larger than it was in the mid 1980s. Despite one hype cycle after another. If your premise were correct, it would have ended a long time ago because it would all just be hype and it would inevitably collapse in on itself. You've confused a necessary ingredient: venture capital investment, speculation, experimentation, some chaos, with thinking nothing good comes out of the process. The exact opposite is true, it's that very process that produces drastically more positive income and wealth than is destroyed in the inevitable pull-back of the hype cycle (whether it's gentle or a dotcom bubble style crash). Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this, if they have any awareness of the extraordinary size of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, Amazon, etc. versus the dotcom bubble days (for the equivalent style companies of the time), much less the 1980s. The global economy (as well as the US economy) is now drastically larger. If you produce a successful product, your outcome can quite easily be drastically larger accordingly. The global economy has expanded in a truly massive way over the last several decades, and the tech economy has gone with it. It's not riding on false hypes, generative AI and the like are a itsy bitsy tiny little corner of the present scale of the tech economy. Go take a look at Microsoft's operating income over the last 30 years and tell me what you see.

nologic01 3y ago
> Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this Well, we need to calibrate a baseline otherwise its just a waste of my precious minute. Digital tech as such, especially the hardware side is not a fluke. It evolves inexorably in capability, follows physical laws (e.g. the endless shrinking of transistor sizes has stopped) and is the tooling supporting a range of potentially long-term sustainable economic activities. This reality does not exactly fix the relative size of the tech economy to the rest of the economy, much less so in terms of market valuation (which is the driver for most the actors involved). There are various important factors that people simply assume are "normal" in the tech landscape but they are not. They are the result of arbitrary political decisions. 1) The degree of allowed concentration (monopolization) that essentially guarantees rent extraction and prohibits commoditization. 2) Lax attitudes towards data privacy that effectively simply siphon wealth from others. These two regulatory malfuctions could be reversed without much impact on the actual tech but a major impact on valuations. In fact the engineered hypes serve as much the need to keep inquiring minds at bay (by arguing now is not the time to stifle the exponential innovation) as they do to inflate stock options. Finally you have the fact that a certain fraction of "tech" is essentially disemboweling and substituting (rather than growing) other industries. For each triumphant Amazon type entity (that you seem to celebrate so much), you have the millions of boarded-up city bookstores and shops. This is a more complicated economic calculus. You could argue that all those vendors, publishers, taxi drivers, hoteliers etc should have been more proactive in adopting technology rather than have their lunch eaten. I would like to reverse the compliment and argue that it should take a person of any awareness less than a minute to grasp the rotten foundations on which quite a bit of the "tech economy" has built its edifice.

mrtksn 3y ago

> big data and ML Became a big thing after Amazon predicting someone is pregnant before they know it, hype died off after actual implementations predicted that people drink coffee in the morning. The hype died but those with actual use cases are using it. > blockchain Became a big thing after it made crypto millionaires, died off after people figured out that it doesn't help with anything other than gambling and illegal operations because its not better at anything that has an established legal infrastructure The hype died but people still need the gambling and hope to be rich on the next hype cycle by jumping on something like NFTs. > autonomous cars Tesla, although never delivered the thing they promise, it was able to propel them to the top as a car company. Now Tesla is a serious brand. Mercedes actually delivered autonomous driving car you can purchase and others actually were able to offer self driving taxi services but nobody seems to care that much. For some reason, Musk won this one without actually delivering it.