They Told You Crypto Would Change Everything Too
AI Game Changer or Hype?
Today I came across a piece by Om Malik called "We Are Living in Pinocchio's World." He uses the original Pinocchio story — not the Disney version — as a lens for the moment we're living in right now. The Fox and the Cat convince the puppet to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles. Plant them overnight, they say, and you'll wake up rich. Pinocchio does it. The coins disappear. The Fox and the Cat are long gone.
Malik's argument is that this structure is everywhere if you know to look for it. Exploit impatience. Exploit the desire for a shortcut. Frame skeptics as people who just don't have the vision. Sound familiar?
It did to me. Because I watched the same movie play out with cryptocurrency, and I'm watching a sequel right now with AI.
The First Run
Let's go back about five years. Maybe you had a client, a friend, a brother-in-law who would not stop talking about crypto. Not Bitcoin specifically — whatever the newest coin was. The one that was definitely going to 10x by spring.
The pitch was always the same: You just don't understand the technology. That line got used like a master key. It opened every skeptic's objection and locked them inside their own doubt. You didn't understand it, therefore you were wrong to question it. The people who did understand it — the influencers, the early movers, the guys on YouTube with the Lamborghini thumbnails — they were the visionaries.
And the technology wasn't fake. That's what made it work. Blockchain is real. Distributed ledgers have legitimate applications. There was enough truth in the foundation to make the rest of the story feel solid. But the promises piled on top? Crypto was going to replace the dollar. Banks were finished. Your nephew's NFT collection was going to put his kids through college.
What actually happened is what always happens when confidence outruns reality. Regular people put real money into something based on a story about future value. The insiders — the exchanges, the early holders, the people who got paid to talk about it — walked away fine. A lot of everyone else didn't.
The Field of Miracles stayed open as long as people kept wanting to bury coins there.
The Sequel Is Playing Right Now
Here's what I keep noticing: the same sentence structure has shown up for AI.
You just don't understand what this technology is going to be capable of.
I want to be honest with you about where I stand, because I am not anti-AI. I use it. It makes me faster at certain things. It has a real place in how I work, and I think it has a real place in how you work too. But there is a wide canyon between "useful tool" and "thing that will replace entire industries by next Tuesday," and the people with the most money invested in that story have every reason to collapse that distance in your mind.
Some of what you're hearing right now:
- Timelines for major AI capabilities that keep getting pushed back, quietly, without acknowledgment that the original timeline was wrong.
- Products that exist as demonstrations and announcements more than they exist as things you can actually use reliably today.
- Prominent voices who have spent years building credibility as "people who understand the future" — and are now cashing that credibility in for attention, investment, and influence. Malik calls this symbolic capital, and it's a good name for it.
- Skeptics still being framed as people who lack imagination, rather than people who are asking reasonable questions about a technology that is genuinely impressive but also genuinely limited.
None of this means AI is a scam. It isn't. But the hype around AI has grown large enough to become something separate from the technology itself — and that gap is where people get hurt.
What AI Actually Does Well Right Now
Here's where I'll be direct, because this is what most of the noise leaves out.
AI is a capable assistant for well-defined tasks. If you give it clear input and you know enough about the subject to recognize whether its output is good, it will save you real time. Writing first drafts. Summarizing long documents. Answering specific questions quickly. Generating options you can then choose between.
For a solopreneur or a small business owner, those are genuinely useful things. I've used it to work faster on client communications, on marketing copy, on research tasks that used to eat up an afternoon. It's a solid support tool.
What it is not — at least not right now, not reliably — is a replacement for judgment. It makes things up with the same confidence it uses when it's correct. It doesn't know your clients, your relationships, your local market, or your specific situation. It will give you a plausible-sounding answer to a complex question that is sometimes exactly right and sometimes badly wrong, and it doesn't always tell you which one you're getting.
A power tool helps a skilled operator work faster. It does not replace the operator. The AI bros who are telling you that the operator is about to be obsolete are, in many cases, the same people who told you the same thing about crypto.
Why We Keep Falling For This
Malik's most useful observation in his piece is that Pinocchio wasn't simply tricked. He wanted to be tricked. He kept choosing the easy story over the hard truth, right up until the costs got too steep to ignore.
That's not a character flaw unique to a fictional puppet. It's a pretty human thing. We want shortcuts. When someone offers us a compelling story about how the future is going to be easier, faster, more profitable — and they say it with enough confidence — part of us wants to believe it. Doubt feels like pessimism. Missing out feels like a moral failing.
And the people selling these stories are not stupid. They know this. Framing skepticism as a vision problem is one of the oldest moves in the book. It transforms your reasonable caution into a character flaw that only their product can cure.
The algorithmic feeds that distribute these ideas make it worse. Certainty travels faster than nuance. The clean story about the genius who is going to change everything gets more engagement than the complicated story about tradeoffs. So you see more of the clean story, and it starts to feel like consensus.
It isn't.
What Responsible Optimism Looks Like
I'm not telling you to ignore AI. I'm telling you to evaluate it the same way you'd evaluate any other tool someone is trying to sell you.
Does it actually do what they say it does, today, in conditions that resemble your real life? Can you verify the output, or are you trusting it blindly? Is the person promoting it financially invested in your belief? Are they still right about what they promised you last year?
The people who are quietly using AI to move a little faster, produce a little more, and free up time for higher-value work — those people are getting something real from it. The people who are waiting for AI to do their thinking for them are going to be disappointed. And the people who put their coins in the Field of Miracles and walked away are already disappointed.
The technology is real. The hype around it is a different thing entirely. You're allowed to use one without buying into the other.
This post was inspired by Om Malik's essay "We Are Living in Pinocchio's World" — a sharp and honest look at the culture of half-truths that shapes our current moment. Worth reading in full.