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.
The claims of "adopt Internet/AI or be left behind" were similar but for some reason the reactions are different.
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...
lol, absolutely not. The music industry was afraid of this, yes. The normies? Couldn't get enough of it.
That was largely in the latter part of the boom and part of the bust afterward. I recall some words from Carly Fiorina being said (“Forget the engineers”) that seemed to foretell the more extractive future.
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...