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> 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 h

> 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.

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.