I happen to have been at several chip conferences recently, and it’s depressing to see how quickly high-tech moves from one fad to another. AI is the current fad, of course, and was a dominant theme at all of them. I’ve seen real value in it for chip design and other tasks with a lot of rote work in them, but it’ll never make back the trillions (yes really) that have already been invested. When the similar dot-com bubble burst, there was at least some value in all the fiber optics that were laid, but that won’t be true this time. The chips that people are spending so much money on today will be obsolete in a year, and not worth the electricity to run them. New software schemes can offer far more improvement than even the hardware improvements, so the chips will be doubly useless if they can’t run the latest code.

Anyway, AI is just the latest in a long series of fads. The next one is already building – humanoid robots. The current demonstrations are cringey, where the robots are obviously human-piloted, or are failing at simple tasks. Their backers promise that they’ll be useful Real Soon Now, but it’s hard to see how they’ll be more efficient than robots customized for particular tasks.. The last fad was for eVTOLs, drones big enough to carry people, an extremely terrible idea given the existence of weather. Before that it was crypto, and hydrogen-powered cars and trucks, and small modular nuclear reactors, and low-payload rocket launchers, and self-driving cars, and the Internet of Things. There is generally some real value here (although none in crypto beyond crime), but never what is promised.

The bigger fads, though, are more concerning. After George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020 and the subsequent riots, there was a real corporate push for diversity. This wasn’t simply white versus brown because high-tech is already majority non-white – it’s dominated by South Asians (mainly India and Pakistan) and East Asians (mainly China, Japan, and Korea). The real shortages were for Blacks and Hispanics, and especially women. I see only 10-20% women at these conferences. That’s less than there were when I started my career in the 80s, incredibly. So about 2/3 of the US population is under-represented.

This is obviously bad. These companies are ultimately selling to consumers, and 2/3 of the consumers aren’t working at them. They aren’t going to build the right things. Look at the widespread public hostility to AI – its creators completely blew their branding. They’re also missing a huge pool of talent. There’s nothing magic about these fields – it’s material that anyone can master if they work hard and think straight. You don’t even need advanced math except at the very leading edge.

Two years ago this lack of diversity was a common subject at these conferences, but now it’s nowhere. This is partly due to the hostile attitude of the Trump administration, but also because of the fickleness of tech leadership. A new shiny object came along and they all surged toward it.

The other serious issue that they’ve now dropped is climate change. Here again the Trumpists are partly to blame, but as Philip K Dick once said “Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, does not go away.” Physics doesn’t care about your political feelings. There are huge opportunities in the renewable energy transition, but they are nowhere at these shows. The chip opportunities are in EVs and power management more than in computing. They’re also in corners of the field like the high voltage DC transmission lines that are now re-wiring the world. There’s also big value in high-temperature electronics for nuclear and deep geothermal. Outside of electronics, it’s a golden era for chemistry as people try to make better batteries, and try electrical ways to make the fundamental materials of the modern world – steel and concrete.

So there’s lots of corporate value in both diversity and climate initiatives. Unfortunately, the wild success of Nvidia makes corporations think that there’s lots more in AI. They can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, so the bigger issues get neglected. No wonder tech is now considered the domain of scamsters and greedheads. Kowtowing to Trump does not help.