Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms.
First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP.
Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks.
Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone.
I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which.
Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism.
It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.
It is basically impossible for AI software improvements to devalue the AI compute investments.
It's the other way around, software improvements make the hardware more valuable. Let's say that one unit of compute can generate one unit of value. As the software improves on any of the principal axes (cheaper cost for same quality, or new capabilities that you could previously not get for any price), that same unit of compute will produce more value.
What would threaten those compute investments? Basically order of magnitude improvements in the hardware, but that kind of thing will take longer to happen than the projected lifetime of the hardware. (Or the demand for AI evaporating, but that tends to be an issue of faith that is hard to have a useful discussion on.)
I think things are pretty clear. I don’t know when the markets will agree, sadly.
We do know technological advancements will leave the data centers as stranded assets. There’s not enough money in the most optimistic revenue projections to pay for them, and models are simultaneously getting better and cheaper to operate.
Adobe (and similar companies) will either improve or be replaced by vibe coding. I think the assumption a lot of wall street and management is making is that Adobe can replace itself with vibe coding and vibe customer support, and then not be simultaneously out-innovated by a few dozen companies founded by folks they laid off.
Local inference is 6-12 months behind SOTA. If that holds, you can have a 2029 SOTA locally on a Rapberry Pi 8, or 2030 SOTA for $500/month (in 2026 dollars). If 2030 SOTA is qualitatively better at that point, then we’ll be way past AGI, and the economy will be unrecognizable.
Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely.
> and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks.
It's even worse than that. I'm not aware of any tasks which it's good at. Even after several years of effort, LLMs suck at coding, the thing they are supposedly best at. Maybe it'll get good, but right now it just isn't.
If you’re not aware of what it’s good at, given what very smart people are saying and doing with it, I think you’re either not paying attention or aren’t being intellectually honest with yourself
Or those people aren't actually very smart, or they're caught up in the hype, or since they are very smart they exist in a mode where their experience doesn't translate to normal, everyday situations.
It seems that AI coding tools are very sensitive to codebase structure. If you work on a monolith with relatively simple, straightforward structure this is the happy path. A bird's nest of microservices is not. If your team has taken the time and effort to structure the codebase in a way that's amenable to AI, and you invest in the tooling, and you keep up that effort over time, then AI does seem to work.. Not "10x productivity gain" as they try to sell it to us, but maybe >1.0x. It's not clear, though, that for the vast majority of developers AI provides any speedup whatsoever. That's the problem. If it only works for the top 5% or whatever, that addressable market is very, very small.
Meanwhile, according to Jensen Huang, the reason growth isn't on track is all the negative skeptics:
> In Mr. Huang’s view, the critics want regulations that will hamper the A.I. industry and slow it down. Meanwhile, the skeptics are “scaring people from making the investments in A.I.” that would make it better.
What a weak, out of touch statement. This guy is at the helm of the most valuable company in world history and according to him the thing that's threatening their growth is.. negative vibes?
The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not.
We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
We can debate whether conventional weapons are better than nuclear weapons or not. But none of that matters. We’re better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it…
The problem with your analogies are that there is no path where a constant improvement to cars leads to anything but better outcomes for human.
There is no realistic or likely path where improvements to cellphones leads to anything but better outcomes for humans.
However, if AI keeps getting better to the extent we can imagine, ie Super Intelligence, the outcomes are more likely to be extinction level negative than positive.
I have a much more positive outlook on humanity and I don't share the same doomsday scenario. For me, I made the conscious decision to turn off the news after covid. Something obviously flipped in that period where the negativity just compounded, and it just feeds into itself. I watch my own family sucked into the cycle of "what did trump do now!" kind of stuff and I found it really wasn't healthy for my own mental being. Ignorance is bliss.
> We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
I don't know why people keep pointing to history to argue adoption is inevitable. Isn't history is littered with no-code solutions that no one uses anymore?
I spent a year in high school with this at the top of the chalk board of my history class: "Those who don't study history are destined to repeat it"
The internet has been entwined in my life since 1991, when I got my first email. Before that it was BBS's. The context and parallels that I'm witnessing now very much align with what I've seen before over the last 35 years. I've bet on some history based predictions in this cycle that few else saw, that absolutely have come true.
This isn't a no-code solution, and not even close to that. It is very much of a more code than ever solution.
> You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people.
For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk.
Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done.
Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape.
Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc.
All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.
Probably because at that time, normal people weren't rolling off the back of a massive inflationary period where they can no longer afford to look forward to having enough money to buy/use/participate in whatever cool new technology arises.
There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale.
Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2]
Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3]
A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype.
You're completely forgetting "all your jobs are going to get outsourced to India". There was panic that internet connectivity would make local talent obsolete.
Microsoft was in full swing with trying to strangle the computing space. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" was a term coined from that era. Ballmer called Linux "a cancer". [0]
People were in a panic about Napster and how the internet would steal billions of dollars.
It does seem like people are much more against AI now than the dot-com boom then, but it's all looks and sounds very familiar to me.
Right before the Millenium, mainstream media like the NYT was blaming the internet and "violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake" for the Columbine Massacre [0] and other similar mass shootings in the 90s.
A lot of those reporters are now leadership at major newspapers like the NYT (eg. Applebome who linked Doom with Columbine and is now the Deputy National Editor for the NYT).
A large amount of reporters (both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists) discussing technology today are literally boomers who have been fighting this battle against each other since the 1990s and taking all the airtime away from alternative younger voices on both sides.
Just seconding this…people have a starry eyed view of the dotcom boom but there was a lot of waste and outright fraud. A lot of theoretical improvements to business processes were lost because…the businesses didn't want to change their processes.
The difference is that the dot-com boom created things normal people actually wanted - online shopping, email, search. The AI boom so far has mostly created things that make existing workflows marginally faster for knowledge workers while threatening to replace those same workers. The value proposition for the average person is "your job might disappear" vs "you can generate a mediocre image slightly faster." The tools that actually work well (coding assistants, search, translation) are genuinely useful but they're invisible infrastructure improvements, not exciting consumer products. Hard to love a boom whose main visible output is slop content and chatbots that hallucinate.
Wheat farming around the time of the McCormick reaper.[1] Farm employment dropped by half between 1900 and 1930. Production up. Wheat cheaper.
Coal mining from 1950-1970. Production up. Coal cheaper. Employment way down. Classic book, "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" (1963) on how Appalachia became really poor.
I'm sorry I don't have better statistics but after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I think it took roughly 15 years for the stock market to bounce back. Though I could be wrong, I think unemployment was also high, including in the tech sector.
I feel this is because dot com was increased human connect and made the world closer. This boom is only about reducing cost for companies by reducing people. There is hardly any talk about improving user experience. This is very negative outcome imo. Businesses can't be only to serve their shareholders. People are under estimating the effect this would have on the economy and finally on these businesses themselves as economy is all about rotation of money. Once businesses stop paying salary and concentrate everything to their owners, economy grinds to halt.
AI boom is clearly anti human. People are fearing jobs, livelihoods, and their homes. I don't think anyone in right mind would have accepted this had this not been marketed the way it has been
I think this is because the prevailing narrative around this bubble is:
A) AI gets very good and you'll lose your job.
OR
B) This whole thing is a bubble and because of how many eggs have been put in this single basket, when the bubble pops, you'll lose your job as we head into a recession.
It really does just seem like pure downside to the average person, not even to mention all the slop everywhere, deepfake revenge porn being democratized, and generally just having bad gpt wrappers shoved down your throat.
Edit: There really isn't a sense that AI is going to help the common person. Inequality is rising and AI seems to only fuel this fire. I hope that we as a society can actually distributed the fruits of AI to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath.
With the way things are going, we'll end up with identify verification rolled out everywhere. I don't mean to just read content, but instead to post online. Anything. An image, upload a video, write comments in text.
This doesn't mean doxxing. I can have my identity verified with, for example, Youtube... but still have a handle/nick presented to end users. My real name need not be exposed.
However without something like this, there's no real hope at curtailing what's coming down the pipe. And I say this without liking it, wanting it, I've fought for an anonymous internet my entire life. But I think that's just... over now.
Either the internet will die, no forum, comment section, video site will live, or we end up with identity verification and gated posting online.
I just don't see how else to deal with this.
I'm not even saying you can't use AI to write comments, although I think that's a dumb way to interact with other people. It's simply that within a year, there won't be a single way to tell a single post from AI or human. A single video. Anything.
And preventing fake accounts, sock puppeting, is the only way to even hope to stem that tide. And further, we'll need to be able to sue for defamation. Fraudulent activity. Foreign interference. The change required because of all of this, is literally repugnant.
I believe here the utility will perhaps come a lot later than the hype - The advances in multimodal settings have been great but reasoning not so much.
I was too young to understand the dot com boom when it happened, being in grade school at the time. But I do remember when smartphones became not just a luxury, but a necessity, and how amazing the iPod seemed when it first came out. It was like something out of Star Trek.
Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters.
So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!).
I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?"
Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook!
And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there.
Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.
Virtually everyone I know is using AI, from helping with creative writing, to making video series, to programming, to homework help, to writing speeches.
And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it.
Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.
An excellent analogy would be the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles: yeah, the oil wells were dirty and everyone knew it, smog became a thing, sitting in traffic became a serious problem, and fatal vehicle crashes start happening, yet everyone kept using them.
There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3].
Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7].
There is nothing wrong with that stance, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier.
We've had a few dud booms in the last fifteen years. 3D TV. VR. Metaverse. Electric cars in the US. They all worked technically, but just didn't catch on.
Look at the massive and growing wealth & power inequality today, an age of aristocrats, then look at these AI fucks bragging about how AI will eliminate all white collar jobs. Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. You can already see LLMs are making programmers much more productive but it's actually causing lower salaries and job losses - so who's capturing the value of that increased productivity? Not workers..
Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past).
> Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital.
Right now sota models requires a lot of iron.
It's possible that this will always be the case. But its is not a certainty!
We've seen software improvements shave orders of magnitude of compute requirements before. This could totally happen here. Iron could easily become stranded assets.
But that said, models have already become commodities, well somewhat.
Is the value in running inference or applying it?
Today, we dare not use vibe coded libraries for mission critical things, HTML sanitization as an example.
But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility?
Made by a nerd in a garage.
Established code bases is a moat today. It might not be in 5 years.
Big tech won't be well positioned to take advantage, because trusting vibe coded crap is risky.
My point is mostly: the future is uncertain. Big established software companies might see their moat challenged by nerd in a garage running LLMs in the cloud.
What about the Adobe suite? AutoCAD? Office, etc.
(To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat).
> To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat
This is the answer to all of your questions. Network effect and brand recognition sell Oracle, Adobe, office etc. Alternatives to all of them already exist, with either feature parity or close enough for most people.
The existing brands keep going because big companies and institutions don't pay for products vibe coded by some guy in a garage, they buy products that have paid support that they know will continue to exist for years.
Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms.
First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP.
Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks.
Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone.
I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-...
Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism.
It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.
We don't know if there will be software improvements leaving the AI data centers as stranded assets.
We don't know if software product like Adobe suite will be irrelevant or cloned with vibe coding.
The assumption that inference with sota won't be local in 5 years is not certain.
It is basically impossible for AI software improvements to devalue the AI compute investments.
It's the other way around, software improvements make the hardware more valuable. Let's say that one unit of compute can generate one unit of value. As the software improves on any of the principal axes (cheaper cost for same quality, or new capabilities that you could previously not get for any price), that same unit of compute will produce more value.
What would threaten those compute investments? Basically order of magnitude improvements in the hardware, but that kind of thing will take longer to happen than the projected lifetime of the hardware. (Or the demand for AI evaporating, but that tends to be an issue of faith that is hard to have a useful discussion on.)
I think things are pretty clear. I don’t know when the markets will agree, sadly.
We do know technological advancements will leave the data centers as stranded assets. There’s not enough money in the most optimistic revenue projections to pay for them, and models are simultaneously getting better and cheaper to operate.
Adobe (and similar companies) will either improve or be replaced by vibe coding. I think the assumption a lot of wall street and management is making is that Adobe can replace itself with vibe coding and vibe customer support, and then not be simultaneously out-innovated by a few dozen companies founded by folks they laid off.
Local inference is 6-12 months behind SOTA. If that holds, you can have a 2029 SOTA locally on a Rapberry Pi 8, or 2030 SOTA for $500/month (in 2026 dollars). If 2030 SOTA is qualitatively better at that point, then we’ll be way past AGI, and the economy will be unrecognizable.
Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely.
That's just not the world we live in currently.
> and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks.
It's even worse than that. I'm not aware of any tasks which it's good at. Even after several years of effort, LLMs suck at coding, the thing they are supposedly best at. Maybe it'll get good, but right now it just isn't.
If you’re not aware of what it’s good at, given what very smart people are saying and doing with it, I think you’re either not paying attention or aren’t being intellectually honest with yourself
Or those people aren't actually very smart, or they're caught up in the hype, or since they are very smart they exist in a mode where their experience doesn't translate to normal, everyday situations.
It seems that AI coding tools are very sensitive to codebase structure. If you work on a monolith with relatively simple, straightforward structure this is the happy path. A bird's nest of microservices is not. If your team has taken the time and effort to structure the codebase in a way that's amenable to AI, and you invest in the tooling, and you keep up that effort over time, then AI does seem to work.. Not "10x productivity gain" as they try to sell it to us, but maybe >1.0x. It's not clear, though, that for the vast majority of developers AI provides any speedup whatsoever. That's the problem. If it only works for the top 5% or whatever, that addressable market is very, very small.
Meanwhile, according to Jensen Huang, the reason growth isn't on track is all the negative skeptics:
> In Mr. Huang’s view, the critics want regulations that will hamper the A.I. industry and slow it down. Meanwhile, the skeptics are “scaring people from making the investments in A.I.” that would make it better.
What a weak, out of touch statement. This guy is at the helm of the most valuable company in world history and according to him the thing that's threatening their growth is.. negative vibes?
Where are the adults?
Thanks for articulating exactly how I feel.
The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not.
We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
We can debate whether conventional weapons are better than nuclear weapons or not. But none of that matters. We’re better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it…
The problem with your analogies are that there is no path where a constant improvement to cars leads to anything but better outcomes for human.
There is no realistic or likely path where improvements to cellphones leads to anything but better outcomes for humans.
However, if AI keeps getting better to the extent we can imagine, ie Super Intelligence, the outcomes are more likely to be extinction level negative than positive.
I have a much more positive outlook on humanity and I don't share the same doomsday scenario. For me, I made the conscious decision to turn off the news after covid. Something obviously flipped in that period where the negativity just compounded, and it just feeds into itself. I watch my own family sucked into the cycle of "what did trump do now!" kind of stuff and I found it really wasn't healthy for my own mental being. Ignorance is bliss.
> We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
I don't know why people keep pointing to history to argue adoption is inevitable. Isn't history is littered with no-code solutions that no one uses anymore?
I spent a year in high school with this at the top of the chalk board of my history class: "Those who don't study history are destined to repeat it"
The internet has been entwined in my life since 1991, when I got my first email. Before that it was BBS's. The context and parallels that I'm witnessing now very much align with what I've seen before over the last 35 years. I've bet on some history based predictions in this cycle that few else saw, that absolutely have come true.
This isn't a no-code solution, and not even close to that. It is very much of a more code than ever solution.
Who are the actors working to "improve it" though?
You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people.
You have elected officials who might mean well but won't be able to react quickly and don't understand the nuance of a lot of tech things.
You have ordinary people trying to figure out how to make use of this stuff without losing their own jobs. But they don't have a ton of influence.
> You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people.
For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk.
Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done.
Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape.
Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc.
All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.
I do agree with you, there is too much grift, but that's to be expected.
I'm one of the actors and I sided with AMD early on.
Probably because at that time, normal people weren't rolling off the back of a massive inflationary period where they can no longer afford to look forward to having enough money to buy/use/participate in whatever cool new technology arises.
People did not. How quickly everyone forgets.
There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale.
Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2]
Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3]
A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redher...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
People sneered at dotcoms but they weren't afraid of them. People are afraid of AI. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are.
The claims of "adopt Internet/AI or be left behind" were similar but for some reason the reactions are different.
You're completely forgetting "all your jobs are going to get outsourced to India". There was panic that internet connectivity would make local talent obsolete.
Microsoft was in full swing with trying to strangle the computing space. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" was a term coined from that era. Ballmer called Linux "a cancer". [0]
People were in a panic about Napster and how the internet would steal billions of dollars.
It does seem like people are much more against AI now than the dot-com boom then, but it's all looks and sounds very familiar to me.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
Right before the Millenium, mainstream media like the NYT was blaming the internet and "violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake" for the Columbine Massacre [0] and other similar mass shootings in the 90s.
A lot of those reporters are now leadership at major newspapers like the NYT (eg. Applebome who linked Doom with Columbine and is now the Deputy National Editor for the NYT).
A large amount of reporters (both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists) discussing technology today are literally boomers who have been fighting this battle against each other since the 1990s and taking all the airtime away from alternative younger voices on both sides.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...
Just seconding this…people have a starry eyed view of the dotcom boom but there was a lot of waste and outright fraud. A lot of theoretical improvements to business processes were lost because…the businesses didn't want to change their processes.
The difference is that the dot-com boom created things normal people actually wanted - online shopping, email, search. The AI boom so far has mostly created things that make existing workflows marginally faster for knowledge workers while threatening to replace those same workers. The value proposition for the average person is "your job might disappear" vs "you can generate a mediocre image slightly faster." The tools that actually work well (coding assistants, search, translation) are genuinely useful but they're invisible infrastructure improvements, not exciting consumer products. Hard to love a boom whose main visible output is slop content and chatbots that hallucinate.
Has there ever been another economic boom where the industry it's primarily occurring in is losing jobs?
https://x.com/greg_ip/status/1991149493807353913
Wheat farming around the time of the McCormick reaper.[1] Farm employment dropped by half between 1900 and 1930. Production up. Wheat cheaper.
Coal mining from 1950-1970. Production up. Coal cheaper. Employment way down. Classic book, "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" (1963) on how Appalachia became really poor.
[1] https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
I'm sorry I don't have better statistics but after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I think it took roughly 15 years for the stock market to bounce back. Though I could be wrong, I think unemployment was also high, including in the tech sector.
>Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, recently said artificial intelligence was spreading more slowly than he had expected.
his company has grown from ~10 million to ~900 million users in three years. if that's not quickly enough, the problem is unreasonable expectations.
people like AI! they just don't want it to be shoved into absolutely every aspect of their lives at all times.
There is a big difference between 900 million people talking to ChatGPT and AI diffusing into other parts of society. I think the latter is lagging.
I feel this is because dot com was increased human connect and made the world closer. This boom is only about reducing cost for companies by reducing people. There is hardly any talk about improving user experience. This is very negative outcome imo. Businesses can't be only to serve their shareholders. People are under estimating the effect this would have on the economy and finally on these businesses themselves as economy is all about rotation of money. Once businesses stop paying salary and concentrate everything to their owners, economy grinds to halt.
AI boom is clearly anti human. People are fearing jobs, livelihoods, and their homes. I don't think anyone in right mind would have accepted this had this not been marketed the way it has been
I think this is because the prevailing narrative around this bubble is:
A) AI gets very good and you'll lose your job.
OR
B) This whole thing is a bubble and because of how many eggs have been put in this single basket, when the bubble pops, you'll lose your job as we head into a recession.
It really does just seem like pure downside to the average person, not even to mention all the slop everywhere, deepfake revenge porn being democratized, and generally just having bad gpt wrappers shoved down your throat.
Edit: There really isn't a sense that AI is going to help the common person. Inequality is rising and AI seems to only fuel this fire. I hope that we as a society can actually distributed the fruits of AI to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath.
With the way things are going, we'll end up with identify verification rolled out everywhere. I don't mean to just read content, but instead to post online. Anything. An image, upload a video, write comments in text.
This doesn't mean doxxing. I can have my identity verified with, for example, Youtube... but still have a handle/nick presented to end users. My real name need not be exposed.
However without something like this, there's no real hope at curtailing what's coming down the pipe. And I say this without liking it, wanting it, I've fought for an anonymous internet my entire life. But I think that's just... over now.
Either the internet will die, no forum, comment section, video site will live, or we end up with identity verification and gated posting online.
I just don't see how else to deal with this.
I'm not even saying you can't use AI to write comments, although I think that's a dumb way to interact with other people. It's simply that within a year, there won't be a single way to tell a single post from AI or human. A single video. Anything.
And preventing fake accounts, sock puppeting, is the only way to even hope to stem that tide. And further, we'll need to be able to sue for defamation. Fraudulent activity. Foreign interference. The change required because of all of this, is literally repugnant.
Yet... it's now here in front of us.
Yeah exactly: here's Sam Altman saying "ok yeah these things use energy, but so do the humans" https://bsky.app/profile/x2y.tech/post/3mfeulapemk2d
AI won't replace your job. Someone who knows AI will replace your job.
I believe here the utility will perhaps come a lot later than the hype - The advances in multimodal settings have been great but reasoning not so much.
The same happened with the Internet/Web; the hype came true 10-15 years later than predicted.
I was too young to understand the dot com boom when it happened, being in grade school at the time. But I do remember when smartphones became not just a luxury, but a necessity, and how amazing the iPod seemed when it first came out. It was like something out of Star Trek.
Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters.
So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!).
I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?"
Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook!
And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there.
Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.
Virtually everyone I know is using AI, from helping with creative writing, to making video series, to programming, to homework help, to writing speeches.
And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it.
Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.
An excellent analogy would be the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles: yeah, the oil wells were dirty and everyone knew it, smog became a thing, sitting in traffic became a serious problem, and fatal vehicle crashes start happening, yet everyone kept using them.
Holy moley rose tinted glasses.
There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3].
Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7].
There is nothing wrong with that stance, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier.
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=286...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-cha...
[2] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...
[4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/g...
[5] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/o...
[6] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886...
[7] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/t...
We've had a few dud booms in the last fifteen years. 3D TV. VR. Metaverse. Electric cars in the US. They all worked technically, but just didn't catch on.
One of these is not like the others
Crypto bro’s needed something to do with their GPU’s after the crypto craze died.
Wonder what’s next when the AI craze dies.
Quantum computing?
Look at the massive and growing wealth & power inequality today, an age of aristocrats, then look at these AI fucks bragging about how AI will eliminate all white collar jobs. Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. You can already see LLMs are making programmers much more productive but it's actually causing lower salaries and job losses - so who's capturing the value of that increased productivity? Not workers..
Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ul...
> Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital.
Right now sota models requires a lot of iron.
It's possible that this will always be the case. But its is not a certainty!
We've seen software improvements shave orders of magnitude of compute requirements before. This could totally happen here. Iron could easily become stranded assets.
But that said, models have already become commodities, well somewhat. Is the value in running inference or applying it?
Today, we dare not use vibe coded libraries for mission critical things, HTML sanitization as an example.
But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility? Made by a nerd in a garage.
Established code bases is a moat today. It might not be in 5 years. Big tech won't be well positioned to take advantage, because trusting vibe coded crap is risky.
My point is mostly: the future is uncertain. Big established software companies might see their moat challenged by nerd in a garage running LLMs in the cloud.
What about the Adobe suite? AutoCAD? Office, etc. (To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat).
> To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat
This is the answer to all of your questions. Network effect and brand recognition sell Oracle, Adobe, office etc. Alternatives to all of them already exist, with either feature parity or close enough for most people.
The existing brands keep going because big companies and institutions don't pay for products vibe coded by some guy in a garage, they buy products that have paid support that they know will continue to exist for years.
> The existing brands keep going because big companies and institutions don't pay for products vibe coded...
But what about 5 years from now?
What when the menus have the same layout, compatibility with the legacy binary file format is near perfection.
Today, alternatives exists, but they are not polished the same way.
> But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility?
Based on the abysmal ability of LLMs to write code today, that's not likely to happen. One never knows. But I wouldn't put money on it.