Hacker News Reader

That's always been true. We went through PDAs, 3D TVs, smart cities, cyberspace, but some of those actually did become our iPhones. "Nothing ever happens" is just hindsight/survivorship bias.

That doesn’t mean they were a good use of our energy and hype. A lot of those also didn’t in my way or cost billions.

I spent a moment with my brain froze up apparently trying to remember when the first Terminator was supposedly deployed in one of the timelines.

Then I realized the reference was to the "Model T" car. Somehow in my brain the token for "Model" is actually necessary for the correct lookup.

And yet many, many people - including me - were shouting from the rafters that this is nonsense, that Blockchain has no real use case (aside from cryptocurrencies), and that this was all a massive bubble.

Most of those some people - again, including me - are saying the opposite about AI.

The lesson to draw isn't "there's a lot of hype, means there's nothing there", nor is it "there's a lot of hype, means there something there". It's "we need to actually think about the technology we're discussing and make object-level decisions, not meta-level decisions".