Comment by api
2 days ago
It was largely the same. A ton of Internet companies struggled to find a way to make money after the initial land grab, and most failed. The hype was breathless and over the top.
A lot of late 90s to early 2000s hype has come true. Today we have substantial companies with no physical office and that have never used physical mail, delivery for everything, and ubiquitous connectivity for devices. It just took about 15-20 more years to get there.
I suspect we will have AI replacing programmers on non-trivial and non-slop projects in 15-20 years.
The social optimism of the late 90s and 2000s about the Internet was mostly wrong though. We didn’t really anticipate either surveillance capitalism or mass disinformation breaking whole segments of the population off from reality. Like most well intentioned people we had trouble even imagining the uses that “dark triad” personality types would have for the technology.
The pessimism around AI is, I think, an overcorrection from the excessive optimism around the net and the web.
It felt like we all had an equal chance at success back then. Now it's limited to those with enough money or very rare luck. The riches of today were sown almost in the first decade of the 2000s, it seems. Who today will get rich from AI starting from nothing? (not that wealth is the end goal, but in the context of this thread it is)