Don’t believe the hype
Where we try to understand what’s behind past, current and future tech trends.
The tech industry may not sound quite as stylish as the fashion industry, but it is certainly also prone to fashion effects. For example, tech often makes big promises and thus raises hopes, leading to trends and hypes. So how can we know if a new technology is really a “hot topic” and not just a passing fad?
Let’s look at two examples from the past digital decades to understand this better. One is the concept of Peer-to-peer (P2P), which started about fifteen years ago. The idea was that we would all connect directly with each other for Internet services, instead of going through centralized entities. A number of research initiatives and products were developed based on this concept, such as Skype, but today very little remains (in fact even Skype switched back to a traditional centralized model).
Another concept from the past decade is cloud computing, that we explained in a previous column. The idea was to provide IT as a service, thus allowing companies and people to rent computation in a dynamic, scalable way rather than having to buy and install their own servers. Here, the impact has been dramatic and the entire IT industry has been transformed.
However, it is not just a case of working out versus fizzling out. Sometimes major transformations happen only on the second or third wave. Think for example of smartphones. Before the iPhone arrived, there was a lot of skepticism among specialists about mobile computing (after all, its arrival had been heralded multiple times, to no avail). But then finally the right combination of technology, design and product innovation appeared — and mobiles took off.
So what is the lesson? In the moment itself it is very hard to tell the real impact that a new technology might have on society. However, while we can’t predict the future, there are signs to look for. For this we need to take the rational view and ask factual questions like: are the applications addressing actual issues? Is there a true groundswell of adoption outside of the technologies’ originators? Are there symptoms of a bubble associated with the domain?
Take for example two of the current hot topics: blockchain and deep learning (artificial intelligence). Both are clearly extremely interesting from a technical and scientific viewpoint, and both have a lot of ongoing activity and media exposure. But where will they be in 10 years? While not even experts know, trying to address the above questions can give a first hint.
But the best indicator remains time. After all, time is very good at separating the wheat from the chaff (or as statisticians might say, everything “regresses to the mean”). And in more prosaic terms, I would just follow the credo “don’t believe the hype” when it comes to judging current tech trends. This famous sentence was originated by Noam Chomsky, and then brought to the masses via a song of the American hip hop band Public Enemy. Or was that just another hype?
