I think the "problem" with "blockchain the technology", ie. outside the context of cryptocurrencies is two-fold:
1) Permissioned blockchains still seem rather pointless. For most use cases classical distributed databases (or distributed systems in general) are doing a much better job. Even in the iRobot takedown scenario the main properties that were missing are security and robustness. That you can do in a distributed manner without using "blockchain the technology", in a much more reliable and efficient way at a much lower cost.
This was something I was talking about in another thread also about decentralizing Github, there are benefits to a normal distributed system the real question is how long do you need the file to be maintained for? Is security of importance? If so blockchain would allow for such security to be achieved in a trustless manner. Do you need the file to live on forever store it on a blockchain with incentives, short term? go with a regular distributed system. For an AI wanting to obtain memory states and live on forever a incentivized blockchain would surely be the way to go, say if we reached a point where we could store our memory states on the blockchain such as altered carbon, would you really want to store that in a regular distributed system? No you would want to obtain the security that blockchain provides in a trustless manner, as our memory states would need to live on forever.
2) Permissionless blockchains without PoW-based consensus algorithms so far are often either not really permissionless or not really secure or both. Most of the time you either have (a) committee-based validators or an other form of central coordination which mostly rids of permissionlessness -- which leads back to (1) above. Or (b) variants of Proof-of-Resource like PoS that -- as of now -- are still mostly work in progress in terms of security and robustness.
I guess there could be ways in which permissionless blockchains could support AI and vice versa but I think the overlap where they would complement one another are rather limited. I'm afraid in most cases you'll end up with either a shitty AI or a shitty cryptocurrency.
I think to reach true scalability we need a bit of both, while still not sacrificing security in the end;Ying and Yan.
Read on my idea here,
https://medium.com/@scroda/scrodas-sub-zero-protocol-walkthrough-c1677f3d60faStill true I am no in agreement neither that AI should be used on the blockchain as of yet, only in extreme cases such as mentioned above.