Ask HN: Why are you (personally) working on AI?

Speaking primarily to the people on HN who are either contributing to academic research, or who are applying that academic research to new commercial / personal applications, but interested in thoughts from anyone else too.

I'm trying to understand the motivations for why people are interested in moving the state of the art forward here, pushing the bounds of AI research either commercially or academically.

(Intent is pretty open-ended — I'm interested in anecdotes, personal opinions, philosophical treatises, whatever. I'm just trying to get the zeitgeist of people deep in the field.)