For me that's absolutely the strongest ground for comparison.
In recent decades, we've had two big waves of tech advance: the Web and mobile. A lot of people have lived through them both, giving them an expectation that another such wave should be along soon. You could see that in the decade of blockchain/ICO/DAO/NFT/web3 hype, where people, many with shaky credentials, touted the transformation soon to come, taking in a lot of cash.
In retrospect, from Mt Gox to FTX we can see that it was all horseshit. The main real advance was decentralizing not finance or property or computing, but the Ponzi scheme.
Despite this failure, and echoing The Great Disappointment [1], we see a lot of the same hype and even the same people. Is it possible that this is different, that there's more substance here? Or is this going to be another Groupon or Metaverse? That does not matter to the hypesters. They're going to run the same routine that worked before. They're going to take in a lot of money, which is the primary goal. It's possible that some of them will, by luck or accident, latch on to something that isn't a total fraud. Surely most of them won't.
But we should never forget that is basically irrelevant to a lot of people in the early stages of a cycle. And not just for the fraudsters, but for anybody who makes their living on the upswing of the the hype cycle, including a notable fraction of investors, "experts", and journalists. how ever it turns out, they'll get paid just fine.
Fraudsters will do what fraudsters do. If it wasn’t crypto it would be scamming retirees or hoarding PS5s. They’re a largely insignificant part of the economy. At a macro scale private capital has a much larger impact.
The issue is there’s a lot of dumb VC money floating around looking for a quick billion instead of investing long term fundamental research (boring!) that may produce results later on. It’s a fundamental issue with the economy because what Capital wants is not to do what’s best for humanity or even to build a sustainable widget factory. Capital wants a money printer. It’s a big inefficiency in the economy because ideally they’d prefer sustainable growth instead of 1000x unicorns.
I don't think there's as clear a line here as you think. It's not like crypto was just some small-time grifters who would otherwise be running crooked pop-the-balloon games at carnivals. Notable portions of the "real" economy got in on the game. And it's hardly just crypto where people have been hoovering up credulous money claiming they had the next Google all ready to go.
You're responding as if I said they were the same, but I was pretty careful to say the opposite. My point is explicitly setting the utility of "AI" aside.
