Oh, by the way: anyone remember Autonomous Driving or IoT?
My experience is the opposite. Non-techy people are unimpressed. If they want to see an image of a dragon, they can put the word in Google Image Search and get just that, so what's so special about Stable Diffusion?
Meanwhile, (to paraphrase a comment I read on this website) many of us, techy people still cannot pick our jaws from the floor since April when Dalle2 was introduced.
Of course, it's fine to be not-interested and I get how annoying the current hn discussions must be for some.
A couple of weeks ago I had to write out how we could leverage AI/ML in our software in spite of the fact that we have a mountain of problems that they aren't a good fit for to get through first.
The last time I remember the business trying to force specific technologies into products like this was the blockchain craze of around 2017.
They said maybe they could try it out too but lost most of the interest when I mentioned a user account would be needed. While I am, as you said, still bemused with the speed of this change hitting us.
In fact I find that Non-techy people are completely unaware of this tech or what it can do. Which frankly is frightening.
Modern VR started with the Oculus Kickstarter -- it was as nerdy as it gets. Some random nerd nobody had heard of (Palmer Luckey) just had a vision. It was announced on various very nerdy sites (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172881). One of the big draws was John Carmack's endorsement. Yeah, later Facebook nabbed them, but before then it was pure nerdy enthusiasm, and to a decent degree it still is.
Bitcoin also started in very tight knit, technical circles, part people with libertarian ideals, part cypherpunks, part just random nerds curious about playing with new tech. Today the scene is very, very different.
Oculus and Bitcoin in their "indie" phases were both insignificant, i.e. not adopted enough to cause problems for the wider world.
Once both were co-opted by parties with enormous amounts of capital, both diverted heavily from their original missions. Oculus is now a tool for Zuck's Second Life clone, and Bitcoin has never been further away from being used as an actual currency.
Pretty much nobody gets to change the world as a normal person. Most things/people either stay at local notoriety, or get adopted by various large entities which then do the world-wide lifting.
Eg, when we think about AI art, we're not thinking about the CompVis group at LMU Munich, we're thinking about DALL-E, Midjourney and NovelAI.
In the developed world, smartphones brought a generation of boomers online, people who went their entire careers without regular use of a computer terminal. In the developing world, the smartphone was the first computing device for many people.
Shitcoins were shitcoins from the start and it hasn't changed.
Real quantum computers will take decades to construct as it's an engineering problem. But it doesn't prevent us to play with the existing hardware, using the available tricks to reduce noise etc. and get the feeling of how it could be useful.
Crypto (as in cryptocoins, not cryptography) was an interesting idea that was turned into a Ponzi scheme. Still, one day when the dust settles, maybe somebody will construct a reasonable alternative immune to the mistakes made in the past (well, I doubt it, but life taught me nothing is impossible).
Autonomous driving got overhyped and irresponsible companies driven by greed started to send on the streets vehicles that weren't 100% ready for the task. I believe we will see AD one day, but I don't believe it will happen very soon.
IoT is basically everywhere, maybe we're not using that name any longer, maybe "smart" sounds better. Try buying a consumer TV without it.
VR is a very interesting tech development for certain niches and I'm happy it's being developed even though I can't stand 5 minutes in the current hardware. I believe there are many advantages of such a solution, but probably just a fraction of what Meta marketing department says - their proposals are simply ridiculous.
The cloud is similarly everywhere. All significant hosting providers started providing cloud services. Maybe marketers try to deliberately make the term fuzzier, but from the technical point of view it's an amalgamation of technologies for managing virtual machines spanning over multiple physical servers - and that's incredibly useful.
If you ask me, it seems that all of them are a hype train to a worse dystopia. Now the grift is continuing on ChatGPT.