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".