As someone who predicted the fall of cryptocurrencies early on, I would say no. But there is a certain class of scammy hype-driven individuals (overlap with the crypto-bro-crowd is not unvommon) that have the potential to turn everything into a hollow and meaningless hype.
This is problematic, when the nature of the hyped thing is distorted. Cryptoassets for example were useful mostly for high risk speculation, shady money transfers and for pyramid schemes. As a currency these things totally sucked, but that was the promise: "Soon money is going to be replaced by this thing". Additionally they hyped the underlying technology ("everything must be on the blockchain!") and some idiots went along and made it part of their tech stack without any rational reason to do so.
Machine learning is different in that it already showed some incredible value. That value comes with potentially huge societal impacts as it will destroy entire classes of jobs and distort the concept of truth even further. But having a thing that does what it does is genuinely useful, outside of get-rich-quick schemes and speculation.
Now machine learning is in danger of being overhyped into something it is not. As impressive as some of the results are, this is not artificial intelligence in the traditional "artifical consciousness" sense of the word. It is a way to come up with plausible outputs to a given input.
This is problematic, when the nature of the hyped thing is distorted. Cryptoassets for example were useful mostly for high risk speculation, shady money transfers and for pyramid schemes. As a currency these things totally sucked, but that was the promise: "Soon money is going to be replaced by this thing". Additionally they hyped the underlying technology ("everything must be on the blockchain!") and some idiots went along and made it part of their tech stack without any rational reason to do so.
Machine learning is different in that it already showed some incredible value. That value comes with potentially huge societal impacts as it will destroy entire classes of jobs and distort the concept of truth even further. But having a thing that does what it does is genuinely useful, outside of get-rich-quick schemes and speculation.
Now machine learning is in danger of being overhyped into something it is not. As impressive as some of the results are, this is not artificial intelligence in the traditional "artifical consciousness" sense of the word. It is a way to come up with plausible outputs to a given input.