No one sells the future more masterfully than the tech industry.

According to its proponents, we will all live in the "metaverse,” build our financial infrastructure on "web3” and power our lives with "artificial intelligence.” All three of these terms are mirages that have raked in billions of dollars, despite bite back by reality.

Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.