The uses and abuses of hype

absurdity go together. As excitement about the next big thing builds, people fall over themselves to get on board. A year and a half ago, the metaverse was the future. Companies appointed chief metaverse officers, and futurologists burbled about web 3.0. The idea has not gone away. Colombia held its first court case in the metaverse last month (imagine a video game called Wii Justice and you get the picture). But the excitement has evaporated, at least for now. Microsoft disbanded its industrial metaverse team last month; the career prospects of chief metaverse officers are more virtual than even they would like.Other technologies have suffered the same reversal. There was a point when it was deeply fashionable to rave about the blockchain, crypto and non-fungible tokens. Now the attention of users, investors and managers is firmly fixed on artificial intelligence (). Since Chat, an chatbot, was made available to the public at the end of November, it has generated another wave of hype. Over 100m people have asked it to rewrite furniture instructions in iambic pentameter or something equally vital; venture-capital funds are pouring money into startups; established firms are rushing to explain how they will use the technology to do everything from customer service to coding.