The Next Hype

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…