• egg1918 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    So when this bubble finally pops, what’s the next bullshit tech that will carry the entire western economy? It was crypto for a bit, then they tried the jpgs.

    • knightly [none/use any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      The next bullshit “killer app” in tech probably follows from historical trends.

      Crypto and NFTs were essentially a rerun of the 2001 e-commerce bubble, then Generative “AI” was a combination of 80’s chatbots and the predictive text algos of the last 15 years. So the next big thing in tech is probably something from the early 90’s with some modern twist all buried under a fresh coat of marketing hype.

      • Cybiko with LoRA?
      • Gene therapy for cilantro tasting like soap?
      • A serverless, blockchainless model for Web 4.0 that manages to be craven and awful in entirely new ways?
      • VR/AR becomes as cheap as smartphones?
      • A new physical A/V format for when the streaming market implodes?
      • Even more “Smart” devices that only exist to steal personal info and die when the corpo servers go down?
      • Trend-following bots that automatically generate and sell merchandise on demand in response to viral posts (probably already exists)?
      • “Smart Agents”, software that promises to use AI to simplify the already dumbed-down apps everything uses these days?
      • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        VR/AR becomes as cheap as smartphones?

        Alas I think VR is too cooked thonk-cri A new a/v format would be comedic however given that 4K blu doesn’t sell

        • knightly [none/use any]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          Doesn’t seem likely to me either, but they would be amusing futures.

          Personally, I think we’ve got another year or three before GenAI finishes running its course.

        • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          The technology for VR is there but the business landscape just isn’t. For VR to take off, there’d have to be a cheap (like game console price) VR set that works for most people, so game developers making games for them can sell to more than a handful of tech hobbyists. But all the tech companies want to sell premium VR sets because that’s where they make money.

          The only ways I see for VR to become a thing are either:

          • some company starts mass producing cheap VR sets until they become widely available (just a strategic blunder for the company that does it)
          • some company makes a VR console and produces their own exclusive games for it (would’ve worked during the console wars, but Nintendo is the only company still playing this game, and it doesn’t sound like the Switch 2 is going to be this)
          • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            4 months ago

            Well VR also has the multichannel audio/5.1 problem of: not everyone wants to make space for all that, and also yeah shit got more expensive instead of less. Acer AH101 was like $200 what happened to that?

        • knightly [none/use any]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          Eh, I’m not putting any money on that. Part 1 of Stross’ “Accelerando” already ran the concept of smartclothes into the ground before smartphones were even a thing, and nobody wants a vest that’s also a storage and compute cluster that sends passive-aggressive emails to your smartglasses when its simulated personality gets lonely.

            • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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              4 months ago

              Very useful, but impossible.

              Running an electric cooler creates heat, the weight of the batteries to run an electric cooler means the wearer would need to do “more work” which creates even more heat, batteries generate heat when used, solar panels soak up heat from sunlight, etc. So after a short amount of use the wearer would be generating more heat than the device could cool off. Perfect, “3~5 years away”, vaporware.

      • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        I’m thinking it’s going to be security/military-themed. Governments are spending money on war and police and spies like drunk sailors and many beaks are going to get wet putting NATO on the Blockchain, selling spy-detection apps or building automatic AI-powered disinformatskaya-filters.

        Consumers will be drawn into this paranoia capitalism as well, buying technological fixes for homeless people being nearby, people touching their cars or cyber attacks bringing down modern society.

      • RiotDoll [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        I genuinely think there’s way too much money in crypto that there’s no way they don’t somehow try to force fetch to happen. I massively fear a world where crypto has so much wealth buy-in that one of the more dominant coins finds itself getting a major nation to back it, or allow it as lawful exo-currency. The united states is specifically on a cultural, political, and economic precipice and I absolutely see the coming imperial crises causing an opening with which this horseshit permanently embeds itself in the economy. The blockchain is a god-sent to the security state, having a permanent, un-falsifiable record of all transactions would make any letter agency data twat salivate

        there’s very real reason to think that crypto-bros are gonna find a way into a kind of unescapable legitimacy. The groundwork is being laid socially already, even if there’s not a lot of buy-in, it’s something a lot of people are at least nominally aware of, and all it takes is some kind of economic catastrophy, which is likely in the short-mid term, and with their ear already bent to our completely for-sale government, it’ll become normal and just the way it is (“ugh I hate having to open my crypto wallet!!! web 3 sure is worse than web 2!!” they whine as they make their peace with how things are yet again, doing nothing about it)

        I basically predicted elon musk would turn twitter to the right, and everyone would thrash and whine and mostly give up and carry on just because the platform is too valuable - that’s a victory for him, even if he lost some people - they’re all peoplegroups outside of the world he wants.

        This is the way of forcing shit down people’s throats, and i just don’t think crypto is done yet, and i fucking hate it. I’m trying to get myself in a position to more seriously drop out if/when it happens

    • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      It has to be purely digital (finance capitalism hates manufacturing), and enable a new set of makets (neoliberalism demands it) that allows infinite growth (silicon valley ideology) and requires a lot of GPUs (the tech giants funding this only want technology they have a competitive advantage on, and their competitive advantage is having enough money to fill data centers full of GPUs).

      Best I can think of is cloud gaming, but I don’t really think it quite works.

      • Mesophar@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Cloud gaming has already come and gone, but wouldn’t be surprised to see it take off again

        • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          Yeah, and it also doesn’t quite fit because making games is a huge amount of work. The companies in question would rather provide a cloud gaming platform that they control and third parties make games on. But then that immediately falls over because they’re all providing the same non-service and can’t win the market from one another.

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        I just want tech to know its place. I don’t want the entirety of the US economy to just be a one-trick pony with tech.

        I roll my eyes at the current state of things where everyone and their mother wants to be a tech company. Domino’s practically rebranded as a tech company that sells pizzas.

        • wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          Domino’s practically rebranded as a tech company that sells pizzas.

          That’s basically Dodo Pizza’s schtick:

          Ovchinnikov states that the company views itself as an IT-driven retail company based on the principle of transparency. Dodo Pizza uses a cloud-based system known as Dodo IS that collects and processes operations data, reports real-time business analytics, and helps kitchen and delivery staff to be more efficient by allowing for more informed decision-making.

    • marie1917 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      It’s hard to say because so many companies have gone hard on LLMs. I hope to god that when this bubble pops, it takes companies like Oracle and Microsoft with it.

      Sadly, as we all know, tech giants are too big to fail and would get bailed out immediately.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Working at a grocery store and getting chewed out for putting the brains below the NPUs on the shelf (they have to be sold as conventional now due to contamination)

  • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    smuglord so you’re telling me things would be produced in a capitalist economy for which there is not a consumer demand? go back to econ 101 tankie futurism dot com

  • AmericaDeserved711 [any]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    only gimmicks need to advertise the use of “AI” as a selling point. the actual useful applications of machine learning don’t need marketing buzzwords because the end product is compelling enough at face value

    like how many gamers even realize that their fancy raytracing only works because of “AI” de-noising? they don’t have to know or care about what’s going on under the hood, all that matters is that the game looks prettier

  • StalinStan [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    I like AI. I like weird kinda nightmarish jpegs for whatever stupid things nerds can come up with. It is a fun toy.

    Someday AI will get good and it will no longer be a fun toy.