Amara's Law
The observation that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a new technology and underestimate its long-term impact.
Explanation
Amara's Law is attributed to Roy Amara, a researcher and futurist who served as president of the Institute for the Future, and is generally dated to around 1978. It captures a recurring pattern: a new technology generates a wave of hype and inflated short-term expectations, followed by a period of disappointment, before its real, often larger, impact plays out over a longer timeframe than initial excitement suggested. For marketers and technology leaders, it is a useful check on campaign and product planning around emerging technology, such as AI or AR: it warns against both overpromising immediate results and dismissing a technology too early because it has not yet delivered on hype.
Related terms
Turkish definition
İnsanların yeni bir teknolojinin kısa vadeli etkisini abartıp uzun vadeli etkisini hafife alma eğilimini ifade eden gözlem.