3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.
The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Fucking Intelligence.
"It's gonna be the future bro, just trust me!"
"I dunno, man. Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming."
"This time is different!"
*sigh*
The investor who says, “This time is different,” when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.
All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
Terry Pratchet's
FaustEric
The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.
7 thoughts on “This time is different”
Dave Cridland
There are at least three different kinds of bubble - though perhaps these are simply a matter of scale. Or width.
There's the soap bubble, that when it pops essentially disappears. These are surprisingly rare - I'd have to go look up Quibi, but most things hold on in some form.
There's the rubber balloon, that leaves a noticeable residue in just one or two places. Sometimes that residue is mostly harmful, sometimes it's an interesting and useful niche, but in any case, it's a niche. I think Smart Glasses might end up here, some day.
Finally, when some bubbles burst, they splatter everything in a pervasive way. The Internet - not on your list, though you may have heard of it - was absolutely a bubble for a few years. Prior to the late '90's, it was as niche as CB Radio. After the dot-com boom and bust, it was everywhere - not a corner of our world hasn't been altered to at least some degree by the Internet. Electricity, cars, and so on are all of this category. It might not last forever - the canal network didn't - but it'll have reasonably long term effects on the entire economy (which we're all part of whether we want to be or not).
It's early days in the AI bubble. But I think the smart money is on it being the latter kind of bubble. This doesn't mean that throwing money at AI is a sure thing - quite the opposite - but it does mean that there's a couple of things we can usefully be doing. First, understanding the technology's capabilities, which is hard to do because it's different every month. Second, trying to understand how this will affect the industry and the world at large when the bubble bursts. You can do this to make money investing in the right things, but you can also do this to understand how and where regulation, security, and so on will need to change.
I could very easily be wrong - maybe AI will retreat into a tiny niche where it's useful and most people won't ever be affected by its existence. But I suspect AI will end up as pervasive, with the technology having (often indirect) effects on large parts of our lives. And if this does occur, I'd rather have some preparation in advance.
This time is different | Hacker News
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erma
Were billions of dollars invested in hardware during the dotcom bubble? Now a lot of engineering is being built around the AI making it somehow its "bubble" more robust since backed by physical value.
Yes. For one example, have a look at "Dark Fibre" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
Billions poured in to running fibre-optic lines everywhere during the boom. They were never lit up because of the bust.
Eventually that fibre was lit up. I don't know if there is going to be a secondary market for end-of-life SSDs and burnt out GPUs.
@Edent there's one thing that AI will definitely be always useful for. The entire discipline of natural language processing is basically obsolete now — LLMs do an outstanding job converting freeform text, in any language, into machine-readable data adhering to a rigid schema.
They're also not bad for summarization, but that's debatable.
The rest of the hype is totally unfounded. The spreading use of LLMs to generate code will make the already sorry-state software industry even worse.
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В 1963 году люксембургский учёный Хьюго Гернсбек изобрёл VR-очки для телевизора . Кстати, в честь этого плодовитого изобретателя названа литературная премия «Хьюго» Принято считать, что...
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