The Nature of Hype

The flip side of a fad, though, is the problem of hype: excessive chatter about a technology that generates unreasonable expectations. It would be one thing if hype were merely a disconnected phenomenon, like an instrument that gives wildly inaccurate readings without any possibility of actually changing what it purports to measure. In the realms of research and finance, though, hype can actually drive the best teams away from a field.

Why? A pragmatic researcher may choose to avoid the no-win proposition of either failing, on the one hand, or succeeding only to find that people are unimpressed with what they had been falsely told was sure to happen sooner or later. Computer recognition of unconstrained human speech is a good example: Even the best actual products are simply no match for what people have been seeing on science-fiction TV shows for decades.

Similarly, a finance team may want to avoid being tarred with the brush of only going after the obvious opportunities, even when it takes real talent to see the genuine prospects through the smoke of popular misperceptions.

Researchers from Gartner, an analysis and research company specializing in the information technology industry, have even defined a "hype cycle," which begins with a "technology trigger" that creates significant interest. One might pick any of several such triggers for the nanotech manifestation of this cycle, but K. Eric Drexler's 1986 novel Engines of Creation is probably a document that can be cast in this role.

Today's environment of commercial technology reporting and forecasting, venture capital (VC) looking for opportunity, and the conference and lecture circuit creates a volatile mix: A small injection of the fuel of technical potential is finding a vast oxidizing atmosphere of those who have an interest in anointing The Next Big Thing. The result is a hot but short-lived explosion of inflated expectations.

Investors may almost throw money at start-ups whose success in attracting capital may have little to do with their founders' actual skills as developers and implementers. People in the venture capital industry, observes David Eastman, General Partner at Prospector Equity Capital, have "the bad habit of sometimes jumping into and out of the latest fad together. You've seen it happen with disk drives, optical networking and network storage." Eastman has warned, "VCs will fund three or four times as many players as can possibly survive in a hot sector; when the hockey stick projections don't develop in the expected time frame, many will abandon the sector, often just as it's starting to develop into a real business."

The subsequent disillusionment may last much longer than the initial flush of interest, as those who expected too much seek to wind up with at least an aura of hard-earned wisdom by narrating their lessons learned. This is when good technologies may find themselves starved of needed resources for legitimate, moderately paced refinement, and this is what nanotechnology proponents might justifiably have feared only a few years ago.

What keeps a technology out of that pit, though, is the combined effects of many different players finding many different applications of the kinds described here and in other chapters. The need is for applications in which fundamental barriers of physical possibility, or thickets of diminishing returns on increasing investments, make it clear that something better is needed. The present ferment of nanoscale technologies is being driven by such applications, and therefore by actual science rather than mere marketing. Capital and talent are being pulled into play by the opportunity that exists to develop products that have solid advantages to offer. This is quite different from the dot-com boom, in which success was measured by hits on unprofitable Web sites.

The resulting "slope of enlightenment," as Gartner puts it, is gradual but important: It leads to an even less dramatic, but ultimately more valuable, "plateau of productivity" on which most of the money is madeeven while the chattering techorati lament the imminent end of the era. Silicon-based semiconductors come to mind: Their displacement by gallium arsenide has been confidently predicted as both necessary and imminent for at least a decade, but it seems very little closer now than it did in the early 1990s.

Given the fundamental nature of atoms, perhaps the end of the nanotechnology era will not be chatted up so prematurelysince it's hard to imagine what will succeed it.