The hype on AI was absolutely astonishing. I’m glad it’s finally coming back to reality.
More traditional AI is often logic or algorithm based. This is powerful and expressive, but the "intelligence" part is as flexible as the specific implementation. This is intelligent in the sense of a design being intelligent, which can be attributed to the author of said design.
Modern AI is often statistical. We have more data, so we can use that to generate a de-facto decision making database with statistically sound heuristics.
These techniques are all useful and can be very impactful. But we have to understand them as tools.
Your article agrees with this sentiment in a very entertaining way.
I find it fascinating that you can both see AI as what it truly is (a rebranding to solicit investment) yet still cheer for cryptocurrencies, which I personally believe to be not much more than a pyramid scheme to dupe those investors that buy in late. In my opinion, both AI and crypto are quite similar in the ways that they mislead investors by promising a golden future.
But that's a separate discussion, unrelated to my opinion of AI and is primarily a philosophical issue. Cryptocurrency / blockchain is fascinating but we are not promising robots cleaning your house.
But when I hear IPFS = interplanetary file system and then wee how poorly it performs in practice and that it's mostly used for illegal content, I cannot help but think that the crypto side also likes to oversell their practical utility.
I believe I have yet to see an application where the Blockchain is truly a critical component. In most cases, it seems that people end up caching its data in sql to speed things up, meaning that they're working on their own private copy now.
If you now consider that both the mining difficulty grows over time and the mining reward drops, then you clearly have a system with a built-in advantage for early adopters.
So people buy in, wait a bit, then exit at a higher price. But that only works as long as you have a large enough stream of newcomers.
I'd be willing to consider it an investment if there was some sort of inherent value on the other side, so if buying cryptocurrency gave you a claim of ownership on something real. But the critical fundament of cryptocurrency is that it's unrelated to the real world and only controlled by its members. In other words, the value of a cryptocurrency is determined exclusively by what people believe it should be.