The USPTO Just Blew Up Patent Law for AI: what it means, who gets paid, and why it's a disaster [OPINION]

So, what’s the "Next Big Thing" this week? I’m already tired of it.

Another Monday, another email in my inbox breathlessly announcing a "paradigm shift." This time it's some startup that claims its AI can predict my lunch cravings before I even feel hungry. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary. A new era for humanity, brought to you by a team of guys in hoodies who just discovered what a Series A funding round is.

Give me a break.

We’re trapped in a tech industry that has the memory of a goldfish and the imagination of an accountant. Every six months, a new buzzword is christened in a Silicon Valley boardroom, and we're all expected to genuflect. Web3 was going to decentralize our lives. The Metaverse was going to be our new reality. Now, "Generative AI" is apparently going to cure all diseases, write the next great American novel, and, I assume, fold my laundry.

It’s all the same play, just with different actors. They promise utopia and deliver a buggy app that harvests your data. And we, the public, are supposed to just... cheer?

The Hype Machine Never Sleeps

The playbook is so predictable it’s almost comforting. First, you get the vague, jargon-filled announcement. They use words like "synergy," "ecosystem," and "democratizing," which is corporate-speak for "we want to lock you into our products so you can't escape." They'll release a slick, animated video showing impossibly happy people living in a sun-drenched, minimalist future, all thanks to their new gadget.

I can just see the pitch meeting now. The air thick with the smell of artisanal coffee and desperation. A 25-year-old "visionary" stands in front of a giant screen, clicking through a deck filled with charts that only go up and to the right. "We're not just building a product," he says with a straight face, "we're building a movement."

It’s a grift. The whole thing is a grift. No, "grift" doesn't quite cover it—it's a religion for people who think spreadsheets are sacred texts. The goal isn't to make your life better; it's to create a tidal wave of hype big enough to ride all the way to an IPO or an acquisition by Google. The actual product is almost an afterthought. Does it even matter if the tech works as advertised? Or is the real product just the story of the tech?

This whole cycle is like a terrible cover band playing the same three songs on a loop. You get the initial hype, the fawning media coverage, the flood of venture capital, and then... a slow, quiet fizzle. Remember Google Glass? Or 3D TVs? These were all the "future," until they ended up in a landfill of forgotten gadgets. And the executives who pushed them just move on to the next big thing, their bonuses safely in the bank. They expect us to just forget their last spectacular failure, and honestly...

We've Been Here Before, and It's Boring

What really gets me is the sheer arrogance of it all. The assumption that we need our lives to be "disrupted." I don’t want my toaster to have a soul-searching conversation with my refrigerator. I just want it to toast my damn bread evenly. Is that too much to ask? My so-called "smart" speaker can't even get the weather forecast right half the time, but I'm supposed to be excited about an AI that can write a mediocre sonnet?

This obsession with the "new" means we never actually perfect the "now." We have phones with more processing power than the Apollo missions, yet the battery life is a constant source of anxiety. We have instant global communication, but our social media platforms are cesspools of misinformation designed to keep us angry and engaged. We've built a digital world on a foundation of sand, and instead of shoring it up, we're all looking for the next digital continent to colonize. It's offcourse all about the next big score, not about building something that lasts.

Maybe I'm just getting old. A cynical dinosaur yelling at the metaverse clouds. But then I look at the pile of barely-used chargers in my desk drawer—each for a device that was supposed to change my life—and I don't think I'm the crazy one here. We're being sold a constant stream of solutions to problems that nobody actually has. Who is this for? Who is waking up in the morning thinking, "If only my coffee maker had a blockchain-verified personality"?

Just Give Us Something That Works

Let's be real. All this talk of revolution is just a distraction. It's a magic trick to keep us from noticing that the technology we already have is often frustrating, intrusive, and poorly designed. We don't need another paradigm shift. We need a goddamn software update that doesn't brick our devices. We need a social media platform that doesn't actively try to make us miserable. We need a company to promise one simple thing—"it just works"—and actually deliver on it.

So, no, I'm not excited about the "Next Big Thing." I'm exhausted by it. Call me when you've invented a printer that connects to Wi-Fi on the first try. Now that would be a revolution.