Gaming
As we all know, graphics card in your PC beats a supercomputers from 20 years ago. There were only a few of those, used by professionals, did not make a big business. The gold was in selling the same performance to the “long tail”, normalise spending thousands on games and related machines. Translate: flooding our brains with immersive fictional environments that pass intellectual filters and reach emotional/subconscious levels. However, there is a limit, as in real life GPUs simply cook a metal box from the inside, building them gets complicated. At the same time, the artificial frame rate race gets to an end, gamers preferred “good old games” to a little better visuals for yet another big money wasted on the next card.
The demand went down.
Crypto
The child of the “Occupy movements” after the 2008 crash that proved everyday people that the traditional monetary system is simply organised global greed. Then came Holy Satoshi, removing a key component from it. No, not “greed”, that comes with money, but “organised”. Just look at the scandals, meme coins, the actual application of crypto. Of course some of that can be covered by marketing, but in real life, the total energy consumption of the farms exceeds some pretty developed countries and the whole system depends on global internet availability. That gives a bad taste in many mouths.
The demand did not meet the supply.
Chatbots / genAI
This current hype practically combines both: people like to fool themselves and big players love to profit on it. They have insane bets – but in real life, there is a limit. You can’t power those data centres, even if we forget about the burden of physically building/maintaining them and the fact that those companies do it from investments and loans to be payed back before making any profit. And the result is useless (I have 30 years in this field, ready to go deeper.)
There is a chance that they put so much money on this bet that it may break the global economy more than in 2008. That would be a global disaster.
On paper.
Because in real life, nothing changes during another financial collapse, just we lose the control over our own global operations.
This is a Fermi limit, the human civilisation would either wake up or dismantle itself (already started if you look around).
Neo: I thought it wasn’t real.
Morpheus: Your mind makes it real.
Neo: If you’re killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.
Also
"... it's not the fall that kills you, Sherlock. Of all people, you should know that, it's not the fall, it's never the fall. It's the landing!"
