Mastering The Hype Cycle

As well as some of the fine examples of hype cycles from various authors on a wide variety of topics that we’ve  blogged about here, we’ve also seen some interesting comparisons of the shape of the hype curve with some seemingly unrelated but curvy phenomena.  We’re not convinced that most of these are anything more than a coincidence, but we admire the open-minded inquisitiveness of those who post them anyway in case somebody else can see a valid link or a meta model.

One example pointed out by Jamais Cascio is the uncanny valley that happens when artificial humans (chatbots, avatars, robots, aminated movies) get so close-to-but-not-quite-real as to be spooky (like the movie The Polar Express), before they cross into indistinguishable realism.

At least the uncanny valley is based on human reactions.  Others are even more of a stretch, like this reply (by “randy”) to TechCrunch’s posting of the emerging technologies hype cycle:

“Curve looks like CO2 fluctuation, over the last 500 million years:“

The human brain is just wonderful at this pattern recognition thing - where else have you seen hype cycles when you weren’t even looking?