@davidgerard

I've been wondering about this. I think it's because machine learning (in the broad sense, including other technologies like DL) is fun. It's really technically interesting to implement ML algorithms to approach problems, and even more interesting to try to solve the problems those ML algorithms cause.

Contrast this with blockchains, which are pretty boring from a technical point of view.

A large part of why I write code for a living is that it's fun. Non-technical people might not understand this, but designing code (especially optimising code) is basically a puzzle video game.

So I can see why people with brains like mine might get swept into wanting to believe that the fun project to hack on is also going to be worldchanging.