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.

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

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.

> it makes me think we still have a long way to go before it’s actually “intelligent” and nothing more than PR/marketing

That doesn't mean defense contractors, for instance, won't keep winning contracts based on that PR/marketing, while causing who knows how many innocent lives to be taken because of them over-stating the effectiveness of their AI.

That's just one example where AI is already "real" today, in the sense that many companies and government organizations have started deploying it and causing real harm to people because they think it's much better than it really is.

Other examples include anything from the AI being used in the justice system to AI "simply" being used to censor "porn" but censoring completely unrelated things in the process.

AI is the new immigrants: convenient scapegoat for the lack of decent jobs.

So we'll build a wall? Right?

We'll deploy a firewall, and make AI write it!