[chillee]

We do have a long way to go, but AI has made huge strides over the past few years, irrespective of the hype/marketing. Notably this year, AlphaZero, advances in generating images (https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans), voice synthesis with Tacotron, etc. were all very impressive results. Not to mention all the recent advances in the theory of deep learning.

It's good to be on watch for the bullshit (the news stories about Facebook's chatbots' "language", most futurist's predictions, any hype about general artificial intelligence, replacing x% of jobs in y years), but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

IMO, unlike blockchain, AI/ML is undoubtedly here to stay, and it will have a huge effect on everything.

[simsla]

IMO even the blockchain is here to stay. But more in the toolbox of useful datastructures than in the realm of "hip company ideas".

[lagadu]

I think blockchains are here to stay, and that's fine; they're extremely interesting. I feel that at the moment they suffer from the problem that a few technologies suffered: they're a solution looking for problems to solve. By that I mean that currently there's a trend towards applying blockchains to solve every problem regardless of a solution for it not requiring blockchain at all. Do you want to make a transfer? Blockchain. Do you want to manage inventory? Blockchain. Do you want to help starving children in Africa? Blockchain. Do you want to transfer files? Blockchain. All of those are problems and they're problems that don't need a blockchain to be solved and a blockchain is arguably not the best way of handing them but because blockchains can be used as part of a solution, because it's a trendy technology, there's a huge effort towards applying it to solve them.

I don't think it's a bad thing to try and apply new solutions to old problems but it just feels that we're trying to apply it too much to problems that are otherwise already solved.