I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops.
We live at the height of the “AI”-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that “AI” is.
Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions but selling a promise about a better1 future.
What follows from this analysis is that – in order to get out of the unsustainable bubble they navigated themselves into – Tech needs a new thing to jump to. A new world-changing narrative to use as foundation for the next hype.
My friend quite convincingly argued that the next hype will be “Terraforming“. Meaning technologies that allow us to directly modify the weather, climate and our environment according to our needs. This makes sense because the effects of the climate catastrophe are felt everywhere but we are unwilling to make the political decisions and change to do anything about it. “Terraforming” would provide a good story of “we can save the climate or at least our environment by buying/deploying some device: No political change needed. Capitalism can just go on doing capitalism things (which means destroying the world mostly).
I think he’s onto something there, Terraforming has a great, big story, it can be used to claim to tackle actual problems in the world. It’s super capital intensive and has a certain centralizing quality which capital also loves. He’s probably right.
I do have a different fear. I am afraid the next Hype topic is “optimizing democracy”.
All big democratic states have similar issues. There is the assumption of inefficient administration2, the problem of polarization/disinformation, the problem of resource allocation and policy making – especially when it comes to integrating the hyped tech narratives. There’s a deep distrust in the functioning of democracy and a massive increase in authoritarian (or corporatist) policies and narratives.
“Optimizing democracy through Tech” feels like it could work kind of as a vacuum to suck up all those ongoing – largely political and social – issues and reframe them as a technology issue. Startups can be spun up that promise to optimize decision making in administrations and policy work by providing data and automating workflows (which already is the promise that fascist company Palantir makes). There will be openings for companies to try to structure the analysis and shaping of public opinion, there is the whole angle of the DOGE people of cutting back transparent administration and replacing it with proprietary tech. There also is the idea of a planned economy that the left is playing around with but that Amazon has pretty much perfected – just of course not in a democratic way. But the narrative of using market impulses (purchase data) as a form of “voting” and replacing actual democratic processes with shopping cart side effects somewhat concerns me.
Because while the narrative might not be the super sexy sell it has two advantages: A) It allows sucking up the already existing tech (machine learning/data classification, automation) and financing its continuation and monetization and B) allows all the people who sold “AI” as the future and who might look (rightfully) like shitheads when the bubble pops to clean their reputation: “Yeah I used to poison the air where you live with my data center but now I am saving democracy!”.
I hope I am wrong. I wished we could go without hype for a while and actually work on the real problems of the world: The climate crisis, the raging and increasing unfairness of our economic systems and wealth distribution, the fact that people starve while we have enough … the list is very long.
What do you think the next hype will be and why?
- always a bit unclear what exacly “better” means [↩]
- which is often just a bogus claim to kill regulation and their enforcement. Many administrations are very efficient and effective given the resources they have. [↩]
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Comments
13 responses to “The Next Hype”
@tante.cc@tante.cc Aus meiner Sicht hat Meta das Projekt Demokratie Automatisierung schon längst gestartet.
Die bauen nämlich gerade KI-Agenten in ihre Social Media Plattform ein, mit denen man dann automatisch Mail beantworten lassen kann und die den Urlaub planen und bezahlen.
Eine Plattform die so viel über ihre Nutzer weiß, schafft Demokratie quais indirekt ab, weil sie Menschen sehr effektiv manipulieren kann.
Very valuable thoughts here. Thank you.
I am also speculating about what could be the next hype and it could be that there will be a follow-up to the AI Hype. Like the Metaverse hype, which was somehow an in-between-Hype, there could be a physical AI hype. One robot company releases a robot which makes everybody excited because something actually works well.
The fundamentals for that are already here.
But at the end it is not predictable.
I really love thinking about those hype-guys. You are right that the people being part of hypes are mainly the same. It’s a certain kind of people who love being there. I am counting myself to them, but more so as somebody who enjoys smashing the hype and debullshitifying the underlaying technology.
How could we call these people? Hype Bros? Hype sucker?
My money is on quantum-computing. It is, like AI, already very prevalent in pop-culture, which makes it very easy to market as “the future”.
It’s also useful for defence/the military in times of asymmetric warfare as its actual proficiency lies in solving very large math-equations-> see Cybersecurity.
The techno-evangelicals would probably use this as the “host for our new god”, while actual money is made by “upgrading” existing data centers. I am very sad about this outlook, as I am studying physics and would love this to be wrong.
@blog This is what the entire post-capitalist economy is now.
An ever repeating cycle of hypes powered by fraud and corruption to extract money from the people to funnel it up to the parasites until nothing is left.
There is no more progress. There are no better product. There are no cheaper products. There is no increased standard of living.
Extraction is all that's left.
@blog I used to think QC and PQC because attack/defend has played into past bubbles, but I think it's a bit too abstract. I'm thinking robotics now, since it's visual, understandable, allows to build on AI (and claim it wasn't a waste), and plays into the middle-class desire to pretend we're upper class by having a robot butler.
“Terraforming” sounds like Geoengineering, really. There are already a bunch of people operating in that space, and I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t mind that kind of VC money.
@blog Is this related to the "network state" concept?
One could see it so, but not necessarily. Network states are not exactly focused on democracy (or efficiency TBH) but about shifting power and enforcing a political agenda, not about making money.
Humanoid robots still seems the most likely to me. I find it more difficult to imagine how geoengineering (the more established term for what your friend calls terraforming) or ‘optimising democracy’ would facilitate an investment or stock bubble. Realistically, the only customer for the latter would be the state, and I think investors would instinctively grasp that too. But humanoid robots or, for that matter, quantum computers, could theoretically have a mass market, if they become feasible and affordable enough. Everybody knows about the Jetsons, right?
@blog When I was thinking about this last year, my answer was "domestic robotics". It kind of made sense, because they could maintain a high capex, keep using the AI infra for centralized control and they had some groundwork done with all the IoT and smart devices being everywhere.
But today I see a different end game, which is basically one step beyond what you propose.
War.
I'm afraid that if this keeps up, the only place where all this capital can go is making war and war accessories. Drones, intelligence, command-and-control systems, weapons. I don't look at the massive surveillance apparatus, or the replacement of the justice system as preludes to ruining democracy. I see them as the preparation for a society fully invested in war, where the only investment societies make is on military hardware, run by the AI companies.
Regarding the next hype, my money is on defence, mostly because we already see a huge push for militarization in “the west”, because it already runs and like “democracy optimization”, it can and already does suck up current hype tech. So it gives the AI money a narrative on why it hasn’t been wasted, supposedly. The transition from the current hype is just very smooth. High centralization regarding the buyers of the tech is also a given. And finally, there are very potent exit options for startup investors (Rheinmetall, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, etc. currently have very high margins and credibility).
I need to add that I think that either way, the state will be the customer. We won’t see another consumer tech hype anytime soon. That’s because consumers just don’t have the money anymore. They’ve been completely wrung out. Businesses are also in a recession (except for BigTech, currently). And after the AI bubble pops, only the state with its capability to make debt indefinitely will be left for investors to leech out.
@blog I would guess that after crypto, the metaverse and AI the general public will have become relatively hostile towards tech. If that is the case then I would expect the next hype to be somewhat less visible to the public. Both suggestions mentioned would tick that box.
On the other hand, Big Tech may be too lacking in self awareness and thus fail to read the room.