Technology

Except AI can actually be used for things and provides real value to people right now.

ChatGPT helps me break writers block.

Bitcoin created years of jacked up prices for GPUs and is helping to boil the planet/burn through rare earth metals. All while generating wealth for primarily hedgefunds by completing arbitrarily set difficulties for math problems that require grinding the GPU for literally no meaningful output lol

The thing that is so pernicious about cryptocurrency is that the more computational power you throw at it, the less efficient it actually becomes. That means more adoption you have, the worse it is.

Those things aren't exactly alike.

Crypto currency had the potential to dethrone the Visa/Mastercard duopoly and give us a real digital currency, but the whole idea got sidetracking by pyramid schemes and slow and expensive implementations that made it unusable for actually buying stuff online. They will however almost certainly make a come back, either by more modern implementations without the cost and energy waste or more likely in the form of a government backed digital currency (e.g. Digital Euro), that wouldn't need this extreme zero-trust P2P stuff and thus workaround the major problem with current crypto.

NFTs were even worse when it comes to hype and scams. They are neat tech, basically a digital crypto version of a ticket roll. Problem is, you have to actually have something that that ticket gives you entrance too. None of the NFT hype had that, they sold you tickets for nothing, even the idea of NFTs being images was a lie, as the images were accessible to the public, the NFTs wasn't used to actually verify ownership of the image. That said, I could see them making a comeback, they provide a solution for a digital market place that isn't tied to any single company, i.e. they could allow you to access all your EPIC Store games through Steam, allow used sales of digital games and a bunch of other stuff. Not much has happened in that direction so far, and I wouldn't expect any digital shop to give up their control over your purchases without some lawsuit.

AI is a completely different beast. It's not a solution in search for a problem. Quite the opposite, it's a solution to all the problems that have remained unsolvable by traditional means. It's also not a new thing. The hype is somewhat new thanks to ChatGPT. But this stuff has been constantly improving over the last decade, and starting to match or surpass human level performance in more and more domains with no end in sight. There is no doubt that AI will fundamentally change the world, it's this generations steam engine or transistor. Furthermore AI isn't one thing by one company, it's just math. A collection of algorithms that you can throw at any problem. It didn't start with OpenAI and it won't end there. This is not some hype that will blow over. This will only get better and start creeping into every corner of our lives. It will of course still be used for some grift, but that shouldn't detract from the very real changes it will bring in the long run.