What Crypto Can Teach Us About A.I. Hype
With so much hype around Artificial Intelligence, the industry may be hurting itself more than helping. What might be the fallout? What are the lessons from crypto?
There was a moment in time, a brilliant spark. Citizens around the world sat on the edge of their seats with bated breath. Proclamations were made. The end of capitalism, of the global financial system, was nigh. Goodbye wealth inequality. Sayonara wage suppression. Anyone would be able to mine their money in their sleep. Cryptocurrency. And then the spark fizzled. Some things changed. Not very much.
Today, cryptocurrency is estimated to represent around .023% of the world’s money. The global financial system still works. Crypto is largely seen, in no small part thanks to actors like Sam Bankman-Fried and others, as a 21st century pyramid scheme. It was a tech world hype machine.
While the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) industry is not a pyramid scheme and can actually be of enormous benefit to business and humanity, the current hype could end up stalling progress rather than advancing it. The A.I. industry could learn some lessons from the crypto bro’s hype and other technology hype, like Theranos.
How The Artificial Intelligence Industry is Hurting Itself
The obvious answer is over promising and under delivering. A fast track to disillusionment and disappointment. But all the hype, the grandstanding, chest thumping cacophony of self-proclaimed “experts” with six months experience in business, are merely symptoms.
On Twitter (uhm, sorry, X), there is a daily torrent of proclamations on the salvation of AI delivered in a fervour that would make a side show hustler seem middling and mundane. PowerPoint is dead. Excel is dead. Email is dead. This and that and the other job is dead. Except none of this is remotely true.
Never in the history of our industrialised society has any technology caused anything to die in a day or a month or a year. The biggest job losses from cars wasn’t humans. It was horses. About 20 million or so. As factories ramped up, many more were hired. This took decades to unfold. Not weeks or months.
Hype around digital technologies is nothing new, but the fever pitch of AI hype is a new level. The challenge become when the reality sucker punches a hyped technology in the gut. When the market demands the evidence and none can be seen, we become disillusioned.
The drama of Sam Altman being unceremoniously sacked from OpenAI hurt the industry. Already there is division between those carrying on regardless and those urging measured development.
But the masses, for 99.5% of consumers and citizens? They don’t understand AI, just the hype, just the headlines. This isn’t singular to AI. Most people with a smartphone probably use less than a third of the features available.
It also doesn’t help the AI industry when the Silicon Valley elite make declarative statements of Libertarian goals through manifestos showing little regard for the human condition. All of these add up to hurt the AI industry more than help it.
The Wall A.I. Will Stumble Into
The hype machine will, without doubt, continue on unabated. But that eventually will come to sound like a constant pining at the back door, the dog begging to be let in, only to be ignored. We see this today in the constant drip of new crypto coins being launched across digital channels.
The crypto pronouncements fall on deaf ears. People have trained themselves to ignore the hype of crypto. Much like we ignore banner ads and most of the other stuff thrust upon us. Crypto has hit the wall of sociocultural rejection. If the AI industry isn’t careful, it too will slam into this wall. Perhaps even harder.
What the AI Industry Should Be Doing and What’s Next
Microsoft is a good example of what to do right. They’ve built Generative AI (GAI) tools into their suite of products. They added ChatGPT into Bing, which allowed people to play with it. And this is critical. Humans use play as one of the ways they decide how to adopt technologies.
Apple too is another example of doing it right. They certainly could have jumped all in on the hype. They’ve not. Apple understands how humans use technology. The evolution of their software and hardware, especially macOS and iOS takes people through a steady, rhythmic process of updates. Too much change, too quickly and culture kicks back. Hard.
The AI companies have relied too heavy on a hype machine with bold statements and claims with no evidence to back them up. They’ve only sewn mistrust and fear. That’s not exactly a way to drive sales.
These AI company leaders calling for regulation has been seen for what it was; a ploy to build moats blocking competition, not any altruistic care for humanity. This again, hurts their cause. The hype too, is to capture capital in a feeding frenzy more rabid than sharks gone wild.
AI is perhaps, one of the most important technologies humanity has created. Like every technology, it is a double-edged sword. The downsides perhaps more profound than any prior technologies, the upsides, equally so.
But perhaps the over-hype of AI will end up being a blessing rather than a pox upon the industry. Mass disillusionment will have people rejecting the messages, tuning them out. Businesses will be more skeptical and wary, seeing through the hype. Their resulting adoption of the tools more measured.
While predicting how this will all play out is impossible, we can see early signs of citizens being tired of the hype and growing disenchantment. For the next while, all we can say is that it will be a proper kerfuffle.
I enjoy and agree with your premise here. Large and profound technological change takes years if not decades to fully play out. I would argue that we're still early to the internet itself, and thus its effects on society.
One thing to note, is that I would encourage you to separate the nebulous cloud of cryptocurrencies, from Bitcoin. Much of the crypto landscape is indeed overhyped, but there is something deeper going on with Bitcoin, and it deserves its own separate analysis.
There are amazing stories of Bitcoin directly aiding people in need. The book I'd recommend on this topic is Check your Financial Privilege by Alex Gladstein.