Funny thing I: I added some AI to my CS curriculum in Uni. They said back then: "20 years ago, they made a lot of AI predictions, but they obviously did not happen, but 20 years from _now_ : oh boy". That was 20 years ago, and well, history seems to repeat itself.

We'll see. Maybe with Moore's law alikes pushing the processing capacities and a separate 10x improvement in the mechanics (ie 'how' AI learns).

Machine translation, search, recommendation, face/object detection, image processing are just a subset of very real technologies broadly deployed today that benefit from machine learning (a subset of AI).

AI does suffer from the problem where the term seems to be defined as “what we can't do now”. That said, I think those are also good examples of why it's important to be realistic – good translation has been significant, especially for travelers, but search, recommendations, face detection, etc. have been modest incremental improvements. That's great to have but a lot of people aren't content with that billing and create problems by overselling it as game-changing.

Exactly. - "In my experience and opinion, as soon as something is well defined it becomes Artificial Narrow Intelligence - Vision systems, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Neural Networks - it loses the name "AI" and gets its own specific name."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767341

Face detection is really valuable to me. I have cameras on the front of my house and I get an alert on my phone when someone unrecognized comes up to the house. It sometimes false triggers on me and my wife but it let us know 1) when a package is delivered 2) when our kids wander out to the front yard 3) hasn't happened yet, but if a sketchy person came onto our property.

Yes, and it's gotten better than the older CV approaches. My point is that it's nice but it didn't significantly transform your life the same way, say, a smartphone did.

It's funny how people attributed a ton of value to block chains and crypto currency, when most of crypto's value as an alternative to government fiat only came about because of its ability to mask illicit payments for drugs, weapons and contract killings. People went all in on Bitcoin in 2017, when the FBI had shut down Silk Road, the main Bitcoin mover for a long time, in 2014.

Two years ago all I heard in the health care industry was how awesome blockchain would be for our industry. Lots of presentations by big knockers in the company, big time investments and initiatives like our company was going to be the "tech leader" in the space, blah blah blah.

Two years on and you can't find any mention of it on any of the internal websites, all the PPT's and videos have been scrubbed from the NAS drives they were once promoting people to go watch and learn from. All the supposed "partnerships" have been dissolved, or never took off in the first place.

Two years later and blockchain is nothing but a memory at the company I work at. Just as fast as it arrived, it disappeared without so much as a trace of it ever existing in the first place.

Blockchain is a triple ledger so the question is, "Does this problem require a triple ledger?"

I could see the triple ledger being promising in freight for example.

> Like all hype bubbles except blockchain

And VR.

VR isn't a hype bubble at all though. It's just that graphics tech has only recently gotten powerful enough to pull it off, but it's still expensive. It'll come down in price and get better in quality, while probably staying relatively small due to the setups needed. It's just like any high-end gaming setups. Most people are fine with simple gaming on their phone (Angry Birds or whatever is popular these days), some want consoles, some want powerful PCs, some are satisfied with Oculus Quest type VR devices, and some want quite powerful PCs for VR. VR is growing way too slowly and steadily to really characterize as "hype".

I've been playing "VTOL VR", and it's really showcasing the potential of VR for things like training.

Whats more, it's one of those games that could conceivably run on a very cheap VR headset in the next few years.

VR is already widely used in industrial training. Send a forklift driver through VR training and the safety lessons might stick a little bit better, so your insurance company will cut you a discount and it can pay for itself.

Indeed. That being said, I think it has even more potential in making more adaptable simulators of things that we couldn't simulate well or dynamically enough before.

Games are huge and, as a result, VR as a vehicle for delivering games will be huge. IMHO the world-changer is going to be AR, and the two will likely retain many complementary objectives in hardware/software/skillsets.

I think you're being selective in what hype you remember, here...

Survivorship bias.