We did. It's a kind of safe house for gut flora. Not as important to modern humans, but it allows some of your gut flora to survive dysentery, cholera, etc. It's also a place for your immune system to get acquainted with the beneficial bacteria in your gut flora, and seems to fulfill a number of other roles in the immune system
More to the point of AI: this may also be like the dotcom bubble. Lots of hype that far outstrips the capabilities of the technology, but the technology is ultimately useful and impactful. Few companies survived the dotcom crash, and a lot of the tech companies with the biggest impact were only founded in the decade after the crash, when the technology was more mature and expectations more realistic
This makes no sense. Carriages weren't invented in the 1900s. They were displaced by a new technology. LLMs are not the carriages of our world, they are the cars.
> We have no use for crypto-currency
You have no use for it, but a lot of people do (not just for speculation).