The author’s premise brings me to a different conclusion. First, they detail Big Data, then the building of infrastructure to support it. New technology was then developed to harness insights from Big Data, and along the way, blockchain and smart contracts were developed, which are essentially cryptographically verifiable distributed state machines. Both of these innovations have also driven the development of hardware to support those activities. This seems like a solid trajectory.

I'm a Trekkie, so having an interactive conversation with a computer still makes me smile, even if it's just a stochastic parrot. I'm also super interested to see what AR/VR and AI can do together. Additionally, I look at the Swedish model for direct democracy and see blockchain and smart contracts as viable technological solutions to make that process more efficient, secure and hopefully increase adoption of that sort of governance.

The tech industry's main problem is grifters, and I think they mostly (not always) come from other industries (marketing, finance, crime). Somehow, they have convinced everyone that tech needs them to succeed (with their grifts). To me, the actual underlying technology is mind-blowing, but it’s the grift implementations that are the problem and make everything else look bad.