According to Lemmy Users: Blockchain was a grift, AI is a grift, Quantum computing will be a future grift. So according to you what new and emergent technologies are not / will not be a grift?
2026-06-19 01:42 UTC
Replies (40)
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@TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 01:52
Gene therapy and stem cells. There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol. Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.
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@FRYD@sh.itjust.works 2026-06-19 02:25
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities. Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it. The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
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@dcoe@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 03:41
Fire.
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@PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@anarchist.nexus 2026-06-19 04:14
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole’s money hoarding operation. For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I’m open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
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@mannycalavera@feddit.uk 2026-06-19 04:14
Arch Linux
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@sunsofold@lemmy.zip 2026-06-19 04:33
The technologies were/are not grifts. They were used as buzzwords to enable the grift of spending investor money.
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@RaspberryTuba@hexbear.net 2026-06-19 04:55
We’re very stuck with what LLMs but the current shit is very much a bubble.
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@Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 06:03
Blockchain was an incredibly transparent grift. AI is a fascinating technology that’s being used and abused by the worst people on the planet and will probably cause society as we know it to collapse. Quantum computers are a very niche, very specific tool that are super cool but get talked about weirdly by the media. Virtual reality is neat and I think it hasn’t really been used as a grift yet. I don’t think we’ve really solved its UX nor explored all its possibilities. It seems like as a consumer device it will be a niche product, but the applications for companies and organizations are very untapped.
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@DJKJuicy@sh.itjust.works 2026-06-19 04:54
+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts. LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses. The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it. To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
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@helix@feddit.org 2026-06-19 06:22
Surveillance capitalism is sadly not a grift, it works very well and makes billions of moneys worldwide.
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@JustJack23@slrpnk.net 2026-06-19 06:33
I think it is only partly dependant on the technology. Each of the listed technologies CAN have useful applications, but the current capitalist system is expecting unattainable growth so ot creates bubbles and in the bubbles there are grifters.
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@0xtero@beehaw.org 2026-06-19 07:05
Capitalism makes every innovation into a grift
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@insurgentrat@hexbear.net 2026-06-19 07:11
Computer vision enabled selective weeding of farms is an emerging technology that represents a real opportunity to reduce pesticide usage. Similarly the use of aerial or terrestrial drones to carry out farming tasks or surveillance is becoming more viable as prices drop. In medicine mRNA vaccines are quite new and doing cool work. Alternative chemistry batteries like lithium sulfur appear promising and are getting closer to commercial viability. Sodium based battery chemistry has a lot of research interest and looks promising where cost is a bigger factor than energy density. Phytoremediation is as ever tantilising and increasingly seeing real-world pilot programs.
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@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 2026-06-19 08:07
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widly accessible.
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@daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-06-19 08:46
I don’t see why put quantum computer in that group. It’s a scientific research topic. It is know what it does and what ot doesn’t do. And they are not selling you it’s going to be the future. It’s just a developing technology which have potential to make some algorithms more efficient than binary computation. They don’t sell you quantum computation, they don’t tell you to invest in it. It’s just something being researched by computer scientists. Let’s not be that much anti-any-kind-of-progress, shall we?
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@TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 09:59
I agree about block chain, but AI and quantum have real life practical purposes. The current models are not good but they will improve eventually. For me, I would say that a grift is not a technology, but the housing market itself. There is no reason for the house prices and rent to go up to extortionate level. Some will say “oh but it’s the market”. Buddy, tell me what do you do and do you own a property and how much is it when you bought it and if you sell it now? I know of someone who was happy enough to get 100k profit from when he initially bought his house and sold it. But bidders kept asking for more until he profited 300k. He didn’t say anything because that’s how the bidding went. He admitted that the housing market is a scam essentially-- a grift. I don’t know about you guys but where I live, there is always a news of residents opposing the building of social housing nearby for whatever frivolous reasons. These are usually in affluent areas, which used to be middle or working class in which their very own houses were built by the government. But if social housing is built, it is in the middle of nowhere with no opportunities leading to ghost estates. The houses are left rotting but allowed to stand to artificially inflate the house prices. And the rich and middle class wonder why the working class are revolting. I mean, as a middle class, the middle class knows the problem but doesn’t care because we benefit from economic privileges. We are repeating the gilded age.
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@BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world 2026-06-19 11:00
Nah they’re not inherently grifts; they’re pushed by grifters making money off the back of them. I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don’t understand he technology and it’s limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it’s about selling shares and inflating share prices. Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it’s slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it’s not a quiet revolution but it’s also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist. We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but the bit getting all the attention because we’re in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.
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@Pissed@lemmy.ml 2026-06-19 11:31
None of these technologies are a grift per say, the economic system we use to develop them and the marketing needed to ensure funding under the aforementioned hellscape is a grfit.
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@valar@lemmy.ca 2026-06-19 13:05
All technology from this point on is a grift, because the grifters have all the power.
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@pineapple@lemmy.ml 2026-06-19 13:27
Anything china makes*
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@chunes@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 14:19
At this point, the only thing that wouldn’t be a grift is a proof that P=NP, so that we can break all DRM effortlessly.
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@Blazkowicz@hexbear.net 2026-06-19 15:40
None of them are a grift. They get used by financial traders for performing grifts, but the grift was and always has been stock market manipulation. AI is incredibly useful and many competent engineers now use it effectively. I expect the bubble of anthropic/openai will pop once local or on-prem models get better.
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@agent_nycto@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 16:29
The first two are grifts and I have yet to see anyone say quantum computing is going to be a grift anywhere, so because of your other comment I’m going to assume you’re just someone who likes crypto and AI and are mad that people are pointing out how they are grifts with huge environmental and social problems
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@Dippy@beehaw.org 2026-06-19 17:11
The FOSS, for one.
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@jcr@jlai.lu 2026-06-19 17:12
Fediverse
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@LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 17:46
I’m learning more and more that blaspheming against predominant gospel on lemmy isn’t worth the effort.
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@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 2026-06-19 17:58
These technologies are not grifts. The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift. Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it’s on a blockchain is grift. Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place. If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
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@LifeLikeLady@lemmy.world 2026-06-19 18:26
This is the grift economy baby! Everything is a gotcha.
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@AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 2026-06-19 22:26
If you agree with the basic view that any software that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute it, is a form of unjust power over you - then that principle becomes a convenient acid test for virtually all computer technology. Any tech that enables and enhances those rights is not a grift. Any tech that restricts those rights is a grift. Of course there are edge-cases. Blockchain stuff is usually open-source, and yet it’s a tool that has been designed by and for the most extreme right-wing libertarian types, so while the underlying technologies could hypothetically be used for good, the forms that they’re implemented in are pretty clearly a grift. So intention and design matter too. I’d also like to see how the Hyppocratic License shapes software over time. Would also love to see more developments in Farm Hack, Appropriate Technology, and Open Source Ecology.
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@belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 2026-06-20 00:02
Capitalism is what makes them grifts. Llms could be neat. Theft at scale and using it to kill little kids is the problem. Its always the horrid companies and governments who look at any tech like “can i hurt people with this? I totally can…”
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@hamid@crazypeople.online 2026-06-20 00:38
Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn’t just for JPEGs it’s used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain leger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn’t that the tech doesn’t work or is a grift, it’s getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
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@HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2026-06-20 05:33
People say quantum computing is a grift? The other two are are only “grifts” because capitalism has shoved them into things that have no business involving them. So any time you hear them mentioned it’s more than likely to be a grift. They are fine in certain niches and very stupid everywhere else, like every other technology.
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@kablez@lemmy.world 2026-06-20 06:42
I think we are in a key moment for change to happen at a big societal level. As others have said the problem isn’t any of the technologies listed, it’s how they are being exploited and the perception of them maligned by said exploitation. Capitalism is a big part of this problem. As is the messy elastic way that human society implements change over time. tl;dr - some people will pull society forward, others pull it back a bit. That’s the “elasticity” at a macro level. For most of my life I’ve witnessed a gradual degradation, a reduction, entropy and resignation. Balance requires that we now leap forward again. I remain hopeful that a great correction is not just inevitable, it’s coming in my lifetime.
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@njm1314@lemmy.world 2026-06-20 10:34
Holy loaded question batman! Yeah I’m not gonna take this seriously with you just making these sweeping assertions with no evidence.
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@whoisearth@lemmy.ca 2026-06-20 10:43
AI is not a grift but it is very much a dangerous rudderless ship right now. Quantum computing is also not a grift. Hell I feel dirty saying this but you could argue blockchain is not a grift either. The problem in all these things is the people not the technology.
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@grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2026-06-20 13:11
Really without major social or political change all commercial technology will serve incumbent power.
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@Uranus_Hz@lemmy.zip 2026-06-20 20:29
The technologies themselves aren’t grifts, but grifters are notoriously “first-adopters” of new technologies.
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@mlg@lemmy.world 2026-06-20 20:42
None of them really, they were all novel technology ideas snd advancements that every company and their mom adopted because it became the next silicon valley investment money printer. Blockchain started out as a decentralized network concept that’s still useful today. AI started out as a tensor statistical concept that’s still useful today. People say QC is a grift because every silicon valley giant has invested heavily into it because they want to be the first if it becomes viable. It’s just what they do. They throw money into everything and if they get something successful, they pump it as much as they can before it dumps. Even FOSS software isn’t invulnerable. Half of AWS’s SaaS platforms are just automated FOSS software running on their cloud infrastructure without so much as a hint of donation or development into the project itself. They just want money, they don’t care how they get it.
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@kshade@lemmy.world 2026-06-20 20:52
I’m hoping repairable tech is going to become more and more common. So far neither Framework nor Fairphone seem like grifters while some that came before didn’t end up fulfilling their promises.
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@godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 2026-06-20 21:04
Stuff made open source/without a profit motive. If there’s a profit motive, it’s not looking to solve a problem or make things better. It’s looking to make profit.