When you live in tech bubble central, signs of a tech bubble become easier to spot every time. Drive to Silicon Valley on any of the Bay Area’s main arteries right now, and you’ll notice nearly every billboard pumping a product “driven by AI.”
On the same drive five years ago, you’d see the same scene with the word “blockchain.” Ten years ago: “big data.” Twenty-five years ago: literally any word followed by “.com.” Each one in turn, for all its promise, became a punchline.
It’s not a question of whether the Silicon Valley machine was wrong on any of these technologies. Especially not the dotcom thing. Heck, the entire internet had just dropped into our laps in the 1990s; you can’t blame anyone for dreaming about creating all the stuff we now take for granted. It’s a question of impatience: all the investors, startup shysters and panicked CEOs that …