The internet never had its "aha" moment like AI is now. Most people didn't know or care about it until decades into its existence.
But the more I dwell on it, I debate if the pocket touchscreen smartphone was really the moment.
Before phone, I printed Mapquest onto paper. The end result was pretty similar to me using an old paper map. The internet was evolutionary in that regard. It replaced some newspaper, and letters/phone calls. Text messaging sort of existed tangentially parallel to the internet. Search engines were pretty cool. It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life. You didn’t have to like, drive home, to go dial in. Even having a color touchscreen pda that ran doom, it was still a novelty, and not like an extension of my being like the iPhone is now. Momentum scroll. And realistically it was the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 that was the turning point. iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste.
To the iPhone. There were phones on the market that supported copy and paste by the time the first iPhone rolled around.
I would tend to agree with you about the rest; the internet didn't strike the average person as very useful, or at least as revolutionary as it did with the advent of the smartphone. Arguably the iPhone was the mainstream breakthrough there.
But this is what kills me, and you said it yourself: "It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life."
That was a good thing when the titans of today's web didn't employ armies of psychologists to hijack your attention to sell ads, inadvertently destroying the fabric of society. I don't have to tell the HN crowd how algorithms tuned to increase engagement blindly steer us toward outrage and division.
I recently posted comments about how I went from the Apple ecosystem to as open source as feasible. Nowadays the FairPhone only does duty as a GPS (hardmounted to my car). I have to be able to receive phone calls so I still use a Nokia, but it lives at home as much as possible.
For me personally, the total invasion of every aspect of life by the internet, and more specifically the tech giants in Silicon Valley, has killed all the joy and excitement I used to feel at the bleeding edge of tech. The bright-eyed sci-fi future turned out to be just another avenue for greed.
It's just a laptop now, and a gaming PC for the (very) occasional game with friends. If my house burned down with those in it, I doubt I'd feel loss.
And what I meant by it is I would otherwise give the revolution award to the 3GS, but really the 4 was the first “feature complete” iPhone, without visible pixels. It was the maturation and commotization moment for a previously bit niche product.
Smartphones would be pretty useless without internet.
25 years ago when I was just starting my Bachelor's degree, AI was in a sort of "hiatus". The "great" AI procedures were mostly rule based systems. We read about MYCIN and similar expert systems and how they could do amazing stuff. We also read about AI generating new strategies for Backgammon. That was amazing.
But during the 90s/2000s, nothing spectacular happened. We had some advances in neural networks, which were just an academic curiosity given their processing requirements. (I remember implementing a NN that could recognize vowels using C in school). We also had Genetic Algorithms, that were basically optimizers. We had some interesting implementations such as the Creatures game series and similar.
Then "Machine Learning" started gaining notoriety. Industry started using "Machine Learning" techniques to perform some types of forecasting. This came a bit later after "Data warehousing". I remember all the talk about hypercubes and that crap. And how Walmart would extract "knowledge" and place beer six-packs in the diapers aisle so that "dad" would impulse-buy beer when "mom" makes him go to buy diapers.
The ML time was an exciting time, and for some time mainstream thought that ML was AI ... but there were lots of other things cooking.
Now suddenly we have enough power to make non-trivial Neural Networks... and suddenly we have Deep Learning and these LLM with HUGE networks. And industry has just started looking at it. These are exciting times.
The other side of the coin is that during all these times, "mainstream" goal-post has been pushed and pushed for AI... what was AI in the 60s-70s (rule based systems like MyCIN), is not AI nowadays (they are just pattern matching, if-elses!! they say). What was AI in the 80s-90s (Genetic Algorithms, Multi-Agent systems) is not AI nowadays... and what was AI in the 2000-2010s (Random Forests, SVMs, AdaBoost) is no AI nowadays (just statistics!). But overall, it has been a very interesting subject to study.
After graduating I did do some work on rule-based and ML translation engines, but I quickly got bored of it. I have been focused on application development since then. I didn't pay much attention to Deep Learning until 2022 came around and it surprised me. Now I am reviewing old notes and trying to catch up. 2023 is a very exciting year for computing and human language from an application side (I don't think LLMs give any insight into the way humans generate language).
LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name. All previously developed AIs lost their AI naming rights - magic powers - soon after production deployment. These two are truly AI - they’re still magic, perhaps even more so than even 3 months ago and given the number of parameters in them, this will likely remain true for a while. Working with ChatGPT and stable diffusion, seeing GPT-4 write games and midjourney generate presidents of US as Warhammer 40k characters really feels surreal.
This is the sufficiently advanced technology. Literally indistinguishable from magic.
"AI" is not a static name that can be given to something and it remains AI. What was AI today will not be AI tomorrow, it'll be too simple by then.
Just as the AI written in the 1950s is not even AI by today standards, while it was groundbreaking at the time.
This moment will too come to pass, and people will look at 2023 AI as "AI that lost its naming rights".
Just like most programmers who get better year by year will look back at any code they used to write and say "How did I think that was good code?!"
(Although myself I would still call most of them AI).
Mobile's are magic to my grandma...
I know how NN work... I've done them. I am so excited at the thought of my equivalent to what mobiles are to my grandma. I'm 40 years old and wish so hard I live to see the marvels of 2060
I don't know, around 2005 there were guys making cat door that could recognize the picture of the home cat.
https://www.metafilter.com/15802/
There was also someone playing chess with a spam filter.
https://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess-1.html
Indeed there were anti-viruses and spam filters.
In the mobile industry I remember a company selling noise reduction systems which used RNN.
The 90's AI is out there making trucks and ships cheaper to run; reducing the amount of wood, steel, plastics, etc our industries use; helping design bridges or microprocessors; optimizing your code at runtime inside the CPU.
The 10's AIs aren't out there a lot. Maybe it is because of lack of time. But it's just research that moves on, the value stays.
But for most people that I saw accessing the internet the first time it clicked immediately and they were hooked.
Yes, and the aha moment for (generative) AI is at the same time for everyone. That's what makes it a true aha moment.
In a middle of nowhere town that I grew up in, in Appalachia, it was common to use Netscape + dial-up access circa 1995-1999 (that included at home, at work and at school). Tens of millions of Americans rapidly adopted the Web due to Netscape making it easy to navigate and that all happened in about five years. The Web became a common story point of movies, TV, advertisements (@ everywhere campaigns, email, urls on movie screen ads, etc etc); it went from almost nowhere to everywhere in roughly 4-6 years.
A tiny fraction of the US and world populations have utilized ChatGPT. It would be equivalent to where the Web was at in terms of adoption in ~1994.
The internet was just a technology that made it possible, like the semiconductor or batteries, but for most people the internet without social media is just the place you go to check your e-mail and maybe read the news.