> What other categories of high tech reached their absolute peak right when everyone started to notice them?
Just in the last decade – crypto/blockchain/web3, VR/AR, metaverse, smart glasses, 3D TVs, foldable phones, modular phones, chatbots, hyperloop, package delivery robots/drones.
Every single one of these areas had all the top tech talent behind it, billions in VC funding, flashy demos and outsized public hype, but ultimately they all fizzled out due to technology barriers or lack of demand or a real use case.
Actual world-changing innovations may seem obvious in hindsight, but every grand prediction and bet about the future of tech is a lot more likely to fail than succeed.
> It's like someone looking at a car in the early 1900s and saying "this may be the peak of automotive technology, who knows".
And that may have been a fair assessment for the time without the benefit of a crystal ball. Someone else who said the same thing when looking at blimps was 100% correct. In fact if you asked people of that time where the future of transportation would go, a large majority would have said "flying cars", because that was the obvious technological evolution at the time just as self driving tech is for us right now.