I think AI is over-hyped now in exactly the same way that the dot com bubble over-estimated the impact of the internet at exactly the same time that most people

I think AI is over-hyped now in exactly the same way that the dot com bubble over-estimated the impact of the internet at exactly the same time that most people were under-estimating the impact of the internet. "In 2020 everyone will laugh at the idiots investing in the dot coms, and also three of the five largest companies in the world will be internet companies founded after 1990" would've seemed like a contradiction. Both sides were wrong in the late 90s. The techno-hippies talking about AGI are insane, and so were the techno-hippies who imagined the internet would connect the world and solve all our problems. The MBAs are selling bullshit as always and a lot of it'll go bust. But there's a lot of value in the past decade of advancements in ML and a lot more to come, with a lot of chaff in the wheat. The future will be shaped by ML more than the average person thinks, and those changes will be more prosaic than the hypsters would have us imagine, and those changes will be huge in ways that people kind of see now but take on an unexpected shape. I think in 2050 we'll be nowhere close to fully autonomous robotics, but also the combined forces of the USA military will in aggregate have a robotic land/air/sea fighting force that's 1) larger than most of the world's militaries and 2) capable of toppling a nation-state like Iraq or Afghanistan completely autonomously (ie, without any remote control). I think in 2050 we won't have robotaxis, but every warehouse and port in the developed world will be a nearly lights-out operation. I think in 2050 we'll still have wait staff and baristas but most non-sitdown food prep establishments will have at most one employee. I think in 2050 chatbots will still be useless for replacing callcenter work but also video games will have incredibly immersive social environments that are at least as stimulating as real social interactions. And so on.