The ever curious ape

Lately I stumbled over this post by Hank Green on Bluesky:

And I thought to myself: Am I too old to be surprised? All my life technology has appeared, grown, been optimised and then normalised. First it is elite, then it is cheap. And then it becomes either obsolete or ubiquitous.

And the same goes for hype cycles. When we get something new to play with, we do that. We brainstorm about something we don’t know yet. Always playing and learning, that’s how we grow, but never grow up. This is the success model of the ever-curious ape.

The end of the world as we know it is a regular occurrence. Especially Gen X and Millenials can attest to that.

Whenever a technology comes around the creatives churn out ideas by the bucket. And the investors gobble them up. We enter a wild and exciting Phase of experimentation giving us step by step a realistic view on the capabilities of the tech, the way users and society adopts it and adapts themselves. Many of the originally scathingly brilliant ideas and products disappear as fast as they appeared.

Many call this end of this phase of wild play a bubble bursting. Some especially gloomy people just hope for AI to disappear when this burst happens. But remember, even though the dot com bubble burst, the internet has not. It has a become an everyday part of our life.

So don‘t think that you’ll get rid of large language models, neural text to speech and image generation just like that. It’s just drifting into a phase of realistic business models, optimization and lowering entry barriers.

Many of us have been there and done that. And for everyone else: enjoy the ride.

And use the chance to keep in touch with your inner curious ape.