I'm trying to pin down the exact date but sometime in 1984, i was at a dinner party with a bunch of old university chums, and I went into a brief rant about how the Internet was coming and it would change everything. They all looked at me like I was some complete nutter (and they were perhaps not all wrong).
These college mates were from several walks of life (editor, travel guide publisher, film maker/producer, speech therapist) and quite well educated and not un-technical, but my enthusiasm was misplaced at that time
It took a long long time before they came to take for granted what I\d been using for 5 years - perhaps a decade and then some....and of course, another decade later, we started to see mobile, social etc, and some of the surveillance, toxic content, and other negative sides to things - but these were not well foreseen.
A lot later, like now, in 2024, i have calls from one of them about what new bad thing ai is going to do to the world. whilst AI research goes back to pre-internet days, and the AI "winter" itself dates from around 1984, the public awareness of generative AIs like ChatGPT is a little under 2 years old at the time of writing this. and already people have informed positions or views on what AI might do to jobs (esp. journalists and teachers, but also tech people). It is an interesting change of pace. and unlike the Internet, this hype cycle has come around with built in cautionary tales.
Pangloss will be turning in his grave...
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