I’m learning more and more that blaspheming against predominant gospel on lemmy isn’t worth the effort.
The first two are grifts and I have yet to see anyone say quantum computing is going to be a grift anywhere, so because of your other comment I’m going to assume you’re just someone who likes crypto and AI and are mad that people are pointing out how they are grifts with huge environmental and social problems
None of them are a grift. They get used by financial traders for performing grifts, but the grift was and always has been stock market manipulation. AI is incredibly useful and many competent engineers now use it effectively. I expect the bubble of anthropic/openai will pop once local or on-prem models get better.
All technology from this point on will be a grift, because the grifters have all the power.
Seriously
None of these technologies are a grift per say, the economic system we use to develop them and the marketing needed to ensure funding under the aforementioned hellscape are a grift.
At this point, the only thing that wouldn’t be a grift is a proof that P=NP, so that we can break all DRM effortlessly.
Anything china makes*
You’re several decades out of date with that opinion.
Chinese manufacturing has exploded in quality, safety, and efficiency over the last 20 years. The old stereotype that China is an assembly line economy pumping out cheap knockoffs and plastic junk, is false.
China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Even Tim Cook stated publicly a year or two ago, that they don’t manufacture Apple devices in China because it’s cheaper. They do it because China is the only country currently that has both the precision engineering plus the scale to build those devices at the volumes and quality Apple demands.
China has invested massively into STEM, their students, engineers, and scientists attended the best Western universities across the world for decades. Learned everything they could, brought that knowledge back home, and have been expanding on and turbocharging it with massive state and private investments.
Basically they did what the US used to do before we became a grift/vibe/hussle economy, and they are eating our lunch. Now I am absolutely no fan of China, but damn it, I am starting to get pretty jealous…
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts.
LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses.
The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
Computer vision enabled selective weeding of farms is an emerging technology that represents a real opportunity to reduce herbicide usage.
Similarly the use of aerial or terrestrial drones to carry out farming tasks or surveillance is becoming more viable as prices drop.
In medicine mRNA vaccines are quite new and doing cool work.
Alternative chemistry batteries like lithium sulfur appear promising and are getting closer to commercial viability. Sodium based battery chemistry has a lot of research interest and looks promising where cost is a bigger factor than energy density.
Phytoremediation is as ever tantilising and increasingly seeing real-world pilot programs.
wasn’t there a recent fiasco regarding some company called donut and their so called solidstate battery?
I’m sure in any exciting space there will be unethical people.
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
Gene therapy and stem cells.
There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol.
Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.
We’re very stuck with LLMs etc but the current shit is very much a bubble. It mostly reminds me of the dot com era but the money was far less frantic.
Fire.
I agree about block chain, but AI and quantum have real life practical purposes. The current models are not good but they will improve eventually.
For me, I would say that a grift is not a technology, but the housing market itself. There is no reason for the house prices and rent to go up to extortionate level. Some will say “oh but it’s the market”. Buddy, tell me what do you do and do you own a property and how much is it when you bought it and if you sell it now? I know of someone who was happy enough to get 100k profit from when he initially bought his house and sold it. But bidders kept asking for more until he profited 300k. He didn’t say anything because that’s how the bidding went. He admitted that the housing market is a scam essentially-- a grift.
I don’t know about you guys but where I live, there is always a news of residents opposing the building of social housing nearby for whatever frivolous reasons. These are usually in affluent areas, which used to be middle or working class in which their very own houses were built by the government. But if social housing is built, it is in the middle of nowhere with no opportunities leading to ghost estates. The houses are left rotting but allowed to stand to artificially inflate the house prices. And the rich and middle class wonder why the working class are revolting. I mean, as a middle class, the middle class knows the problem but doesn’t care because we benefit from economic privileges. We are repeating the gilded age.
