Why tech hype always disappoints
By: Martin Knaze
Tags: Business, Future, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Technology

The year is 2020 and even the best AI still doesn’t understand causality. Bitcoin is still rarely accepted as a form of payment. Autonomous vehicles still have a long journey to full-scale deployment. What went wrong? The fault isn’t with the technologies — it’s with the users. It’s hard to disrupt people.

Technologies may be called “disruptive,” but they follow much the same patterns in how they develop and how people adopt them. This is perfectly captured in the Hype Cycle.

The Hype Cycle. New technologies follow the curve. Source: Gartner

Its peaks and troughs aren’t just some arbitrary points on a meaningless graph — they reflect the changes in people’s attitudes as a technology gains traction. It shows just how much technologies reflect society.

That is likely the reason why so many technologies just fail to surprise us despite the initial hype. Through the choices of their architects, they echo values and beliefs of people at a given place at a given time. Even if they didn’t, they would still need to settle into society. And, compared to the technologies, society is largely static. In the end, it is the technology that has to adapt.

Take algorithms for automated decision-making, for example. Yes, you do get a few initial applications that no one questions. But if you give it time, the same discussions always emerge. What about the ethics? How will people interface with it? What does it mean for the job market? Answering such questions forces the technology to better adapt to our real needs and desires.

While that might prevent us from having wild, sci-fi gadgets, it’s a logical development. It just means we are using technology to solve our current issues. The benefits have a better chance to propagate throughout society. With lots of technologies, their failure to live up to the hype may just mean that they turned out useful instead. Flying cars generate hype, but drones are much more practical.

The creators of the technology partly share this view — they always want their brainchild to reap success. For that, they need people to want their innovation. And people distrust new things. They won’t budge — they can always not buy something. It’s the innovators who have to compromise. And if they don’t compromise, they draw attention away. The majority of people always has to be placated.

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

Enter the youth

But tackling distrust might just be getting a lot easier. For my generation of 20-somethings, trusting new technologies is the default state. We just might stop asking questions and let all the tech loose.

Our trust in technology is often misinformed or naive. I observe this with myself quite often. For example, I used to be an advocate for targeted ads. I didn’t really know much about them, so I did my homework. Long story short — I don’t like them at all. But, considering how little I knew, why did I advocate for them in the first place?

Simply put, the narrative in which I’ve grown up glorified any new technology that came along. Everything new was the “natural and inevitable” development, so you wouldn’t even stop to doubt its merit. Once a week you hear about AI beating humans at something, every few months you hear about something being automated in the name of objectivity, and every couple of years you get a treat in a film recounting the story of some Silicon-Valley founder.

Indeed, the cultural aspect is probably even more important than the technology itself. From Steve Jobs’s rags-to-riches story to hoverboards in the office, my generation grew up watching how cool the people developing our gadgets are. The “tech startup” culture epitomises what the young want in life. How could such great people do something that’s bad for us? We’ve learned to distrust the suit-and-tie guys and worship the jeans-and-t-shirt guys.

That’s why being afraid of technology is really, really uncool. No one wants to be called a Luddite, least of all acceptance-seeking youngsters. It’s almost the equivalent of being the weird kid or the party pooper.

The question is whether my generation will maintain those views beyond the youthful years. If we don’t, we will turn into the Luddites we have so much despised. If we do, there will be no one to restrain the unrelenting technology push, sci-fi gadgets and all.

It will be a bit of both — we will maintain those views, but the views will become conservative, as still more liberal generations emerge. We’ll be called Luddites while releasing previously unthinkable technologies into the world.

Who knows, maybe our children will laugh at our quibbling over GMOs when they will be designing our grandchildren.