Blockchain, metaverse, AI: the good, bad, and ugly of hype
It’s been a little over four years since the beginning of the decade, and over that time, the built world (and wider society) has navigated three noteworthy technology hype cycles: blockchain, metaverse and AI.
The Gartner Hype Cycle
Purportedly introduced by analyst Jackie Fenn in 1995, the Gartner Hype Cycle has become synonymous with the concept of hype, as has much of its terminology including “peak of inflated expectations” and “trough of disillusionment”. Some critics highlight the unacademic origins of the framework, and claim it is not in fact a cycle.
I like Gartner’s Hype Cycle. I find it to be a simple and useful framework to emphasise the continuation of innovations beyond what captures headlines. Take the metaverse hype of 2022, for example. Currently the most stigmatised of the recently hyped innovations, metaverse and adjacent innovations have continued their development beyond the “peak of inflated expectations” when executives were fretting about whether workers would ever leave their homes again. Notably, the Apple Vision Pro launch was accompanied by both adulation and curiosity well after “metaverse” became a naughty word.
The upsides and downsides of hype
Hype inspires action, both constructive and not so. Consumers take action through purchasing decisions (or online behaviours), and evangelists take action to meet these changes in demand. Returning to the metaverse case, the Facebook rebrand in October 2021 was accompanied by skyrocketing search activity for the unrelated metaverse platform, Decentraland. 2021 and 2022 also happened to be the peak years for highest VR headset sales, according to Omdia.
Evangelists and cynics
The action evangelists take to meet demand generated from hype can be framed in two ways. The first, to develop products (or insights) deemed as genuine. The second, to exploit the hype by misrepresenting their product (or generating faux insights). A perception of the latter is what gives rise to cynics among the commentariat. Conveniently, these cynics can also be broken into two groups. The first, genuine cynics who disagree with the hype associated with a certain innovation and seek to inform the market and encourage restraint. The second, polemicists, who exploit human heuristics and social media algorithms to redirect attention to themselves or their own products.
Using hype for good
During the research for Sustainably intelligent: AI for a greener built world, we propose ChatGPT-induced AI hype can be put to use in two positive ways. First, there is the opportunity for hype to directly influence AI adoption into environmental use cases in built world firms. Attached to this is an increased technological sophistication within the sector that has a positive flow-on effect on the adoption of other innovations. Second, we identified that AI use cases to decarbonise the built world had a common theme of rendering uneconomical tasks economical. This leads to a growing list of viable interventions to reduce the built world’s environmental footprint. When combined, these forces have the potential to shorten the timeframe to decarbonise the built world, which might be the only way to bring the sector on-track ahead of the required 2030 milestones under the Paris Agreement.
