Tech Predictions That Aged Like Milk

Generative AI has already wiped out a billion-dollar industry

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I don’t want to assume Facebook founder Suck Mockerberg can human emote like the rest of us, but I bet he is feeling some regret over the $24 billion he spent on a basic Fiverr rebranding package to change his company’s name to Meta.

Everyone is giving up on the technology. Disney recently closed its metaverse division, or “Next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences unit,” as they called it. Couple that with their formulaic Marvel multiverse bombing over at Rotten Tomatoes and it’s clear that they should just stick to prose because they suck at every kind of verse there is.

Over at Microsoft, same story. They’re all jumping ship like it’s the 3rd act of Titanic. Except this time, no one wants to let go of the floating wooden plank.

You already know what buoyant piece of debris I’m talking about

It’s generative AI, obvs.

This is not another tech fad, lads. In the short time that it’s been in the mainstream, we’ve seen people code games, write songs, channel their inner Gordon Ramsay, and make artwork that even my emotionally distant mother would deem good enough to magnet on the fridge door.

Long gone are the days when artificial intelligence was only good at writing antisemitic tweets and getting brutally murdered by 9-year-olds in Call of Duty — chatbots are fresh out of Beta testing and already making Alexa look the IQ of a Roomba in comparison. What did the metaverse do during its peak?

Welp.

Snoop Dogg got a virtual mansion that was like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Unless you’ve seen Habbo Hotel. And Zuckerberg put on the clown shoes for a tech demo that showed he still didn’t know how to make his low-polygon avatar look less goofy — something my Xbox 360 had figured out back in 2005.

After a couple of months of underwhelming crystal ball gazing, it became clear that Zuck’s rebranding was a corporate play akin to Coca-Cola changing its name to Cocaine in 1929, right before government regulations forced them to take it off the ingredients list.

Wanna metaverse? Boot up Fortnite and squint your eyes. It’s not getting any better.

But of course, making fun of the metaverse is easy now

Because now we know that the next 10 years in tech will be exclusively about trying to plug ChatGPT into a golden chassis until we spark C3PO to life. But a little more than a year ago, the metaverse was seriously considered to be the next trillion-dollar investment opportunity.

Oh, a completely new, marketable geography with rock-bottom overhead costs where everything sells at a 100% profit margin, you say?

During that time, every CFO woke up in a midnight sweat, drank a gallon of hype juice, and nervously started to look around for anything that could be 3D-rendered. And I mean anything. I don’t know how many data-mining cookies you’d need to find the kind of target audience that would wanna buy metaverse-based merch from companies like Pepsi or Walmart, but both had plans to throw a coin into this butt crack.

For all of them, lockdowns were proof of concept. It was a matter of time before people finally decided to escape the inconveniences of direct sunlight and daily showers and started living life at 30fps. Before you could even have time to ask Zuckerberg where your avatar’s legs were, Nike was already minting sneakers on the blockchain.

That was not the first time we all lost our minds about the next “big thing in tech”

Before the metaverse, back when Twitter wasn’t owned by a guy who gets the urge to make Dogecoin the new world currency every time his Asperger’s goes Turbo Mode, everyone was losing it with crypto.

It’s hard to spot exactly when it went mainstream, but if I had to guess, I would point to that ad where Matt Damon basically called everyone a couch-warming cuckold unless they converted their life savings into a highly volatile cyber gamble.

But at the time, the exchanges were solvent and Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t being HODL’d in a prison cell, so no one could’ve predicted that crypto would crash and make the Bitcoin logo top the ranking for “2021’s Most Regrettable Buttcheek Tattoos.”

Matt was fine, though. He was paid in dollars.

Same thing with the NFT market. The whole scene nowadays is just rug pulls by the Paul brothers. It now sounds ridiculous to even consider paying six figures for what is essentially a worse version of the “Save Image As” command that comes for free on every computer. But let’s not forget that, back then, many people would’ve unplugged their grandmas to mine ETH for the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Hell, when Beeple sold that JPEG for $69 million, even I had the urge to burn my Skillshare coupons on an MS Paint course and start working on my OpenSea portfolio.

Now we’re at the point where AI feels like “the next big thing”

You know a piece of technology has potential when it gives Bing a chance at becoming a verb. And AI truly feels like it’s full of it.

But the road between potential and actual utility is a $60 Uber. We have no actual idea about how AI is going to mature and find its place as a technology. And as the internet fills itself on think pieces and Twitter threads about how AI is gonna change work, I can’t stop thinking it looks an awful lot like when the internet was full of think pieces and Twitter threads about how crypto was gonna change finance.

Me? I’m still rooting for the metaverse.

No, not the dystopic, ad-pestered craphole that Zucks wants to build for his Meta shareholders to prove how much of an obedient power-bottom he is. But you gotta be optimistic about the applications it could have for healthcare and education. And who knows, in a few years, when AI gets smart enough to bypass Captcha tests and the internet gets bukkakke’d with a tsunami of bot-generated content like we’ve never seen before, the only way to prove our humanity could be through blockchain technology not too unlike NFTs.

Some of these technologies look obsolescent now, but like a good tech bro, I have the hunch they’re all gonna make it.

But we’re all early adopters anyway. What the hell do we know?