1. Initial introduction or release
2. Major hype and influx of greed money. <- AI is here now
3. Failure to live up to the hype, resulting in the tech becoming a punchline and gobs of money lost
4. Renaissance of the tech as its true potential is eventually realized, which doesn't match the original hype but ends up very useful
5. Iteration and improvement with no clear "done" or "achieved" milestone, it just becomes part of society
Crypto is at stage 3 now.
Not all technologies make it to steps 4-5.
Hell, I remember when social media followed the same path. And ecommerce before it. Or the web in general before that. And on and on it goes.
Likewise when breathless reporters keep asking non-AI companies what their AI strategy is, you know you're firmly in step 2. Remember when Walmart was expected to have a "metaverse strategy"?
Also worth noting that many (most?) technologies do not have a step 4 or 5. They're just permanently/indefinitely dead after the hype train goes off the rails (see: personal jetpacks)
Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.
That's the overall problem with all the cool sci-fi tech - it's cool in an action movie, when the protagonists are the only ones who get to use it. It stops being cool and becomes either useless or dangerous, once every rando gets to use it in their daily lives.
Oh yeah, imagine a transportation technology that killed people every week. No way that would be legal. Except if it's cars, for some reason they magically get a pass.
> Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.
We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would still have a lower death rate than the regular kind. But they can't replicate the "our oopsies are someone else's problem" field that cars have. That's the hard part.
Imagine a transportation technology that killed orders of magnitude more of people every week. That's the reality if you just magically s/car/jetpack/g for everyone.
> We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would still have a lower death rate than the regular kind.
Not really. Driving a car is trivial compared to flying a helicopter; the hoops in question are mostly about ensuring pilots are properly trained (vs. half-ass bullshit trained, "you'll learn the real thing on the road" that is getting a driver's license) and actually meet some health standards. Number and difficulty of hoops differ in various areas of aviation, but they all recognize just how much easier it is to kill yourself with an aircraft, and how much more death and destruction an aircraft can cause.
Where is the problem: those people who don't have this risk affinity don't need to buy/use a jetpack. Similarly, not everybody should go ice climbing or BASE jumping. Thus I see no reason to outlaw jetpacks just because of their danger.