We're currently going through a period in tech history where AI is getting put inside pretty much every facet of modern life.
Gen-AI is everywhere you look online, while manufacturers are falling over themselves to include AI in every appliance you could mention – whether it makes sense or not.
The thing about these tech trends is they are often circular and history repeats itself, and Richard Honeywood – the man who helped establish Square's in-house localisation department in the late '90s and has worked at Seibu Kaihatsu, Blizzard, and Level-5 – feels like he's seen it all before.
Speaking to Time Extension about his time at Japan's Hosei University prior to starting his career in games, Honeywood discusses the tech craze Japan was chasing back in the 1990s:
"At the time, Japan had become an amazing country that was taking over the world. It was the bubble economy; they were super-rich. They also had this thing called fuzzy logic, which is basically what the AI bubble is right now. They were putting fuzzy logic into washing machines, rice cookers, microwave ovens, whatever you could think of, and it was going to take over the world.
At Hosei University, I took classes on artificial intelligence, including fuzzy logic and OCR (optical character recognition) for reading people's hand-written Japanese text.
But I soon realized that the fuzzy logic thing was just all smoke and mirrors; there wasn't actually anything there, which is like shock horror, the whole AI thing today. That's why I'm very anti-AI right now. I lived through the whole fuzzy logic bubble, and I realized just how much of it was marketing hype versus reality."
There are many people who believe we're currently in an AI bubble, and that, despite the insane amounts of money flowing between AI companies, it's likely to pop very soon.
However, it remains to be seen if this event will result in AI going the way of fuzzy logic, NFTs and the Metaverse – companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft have already bet big on the technology, and are unlikely to move away from it in the future.