I’m hopeful that when the bubble pops it’ll be more like the dot com crash, which is to say that the fallout is mostly of the economic variety rather than the superfund variety. Sure, that’ll still suck in the short term. But it will ideally lead to the big players and VC firms backing away and leaving behind an oversupply of infrastructure and talent that can be soaked up at fire sale prices by the smaller, more responsible companies that are willing to stick out the downturn and do the unglamorous work of developing this technology into something that’s actually sustainable and beneficial to society.

That’s my naive hope. I do recognize that there’s an unfortunately high probability that things won’t go that way.