Whenever in doubt find a good use case. Pick the most compelling one, walk through the details and make a case for how it makes somebody’s life better, unambiguously, right now. Prove it. If you can’t do this with at least one use case, you have nothing…. it’s all BS that tech nerds and the media love to push when in reality they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about.
Examples of potentially good use cases:
ChatGPT
1) I think I can use this to make comics to enhance my writing. I suck at drawing comics and an artist is too expensive for more casual writing. (I paid an artist for comics in my book, it was a great experience and result). I still need to try it, see how difficult it is, if it costs me anything, and if the quality is decent. But it’s worth a try to me.
2) Scam artists will probably find a good use for this
3) Generating voluminous articles and promotions for politicians and companies products hoping that many unsuspecting people, many suckers included, will get hooked on mediocrity and act on it.
Crypto / Bitcoin
1) Buying illegal drugs and avoiding taxes and international fees. This use to be a huge use case (remember Silk Road), but governments are cracking down as they catch up tracing transactions
2) Legal online gambling. The high volatility is not good for a currency, but it’s great if you get lucky and buy low and sell high.
3) Money that the government can’t steal from you by freezing your assets..if you live in a corrupt, unstable 3rd world country
4) Less expensive than using traditional payment mechanisms? I’m not sure about this one, because if I buy something online with a credit card and get ripped off, I let Visa take care of it, and I’m willing to pay for that. (This is a complex topic which I won’t get into here, as there are a many interesting discussion points)
5) Protecting some of your financial assets in case the global economy crashes into the apocalypse. Well I’m not sure anybody wants to be around for that. But if you have a lot of extra money, sure this makes sense along with #1
Etc etc.
People often want to make a declaration about the viability of a technology, without going through the effort of thinking through the use cases and business cases. They geek out. I work in Tech and deal with this crap every single day. A good part of my job as senior manager / architect is precisely to stop people from doing this.
I would say that probably 95% of people who make statements about such things have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. But in aggregate if you listen too all their opinions with a business hat on, you can glean all the pearls and draw some interesting conclusions about what use / business case is going to pop first.
