I think we’ll look back on this period as The Great Enshittification where everyone ran out of ideas but capitalism demands growth so everything just got worse. The mass manufacturing of mediocre AI content might be the force that ends the digital era and maybe we’ll all just go outside again.
Here's hoping. It's not that there's no new ideas, it's that they don't deliver VC sized returns. The only thing that delivers the returns investors are looking for are Ponzi schemes.
Nothing can beat Ponzi schemes because it's all promises and the returns only trickle up to the top, they are not evenly distributed.
There are ideas that can deliver VC-sized returns but they depend on a system state different from ours - scaled up energy system, housing market, education system, manufacturing capacity, research capacity, etc etc. Until we unscrew the current status quo, we(USA) will continue limping through these innovations without the capacity to fully utilize them.
