Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

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...

> People were in a panic about Napster and how the internet would steal billions of dollars

lol, absolutely not. The music industry was afraid of this, yes. The normies? Couldn't get enough of it.

Depends on how you define "normies". Sure, students happily napstered away, but a lot of adults (even those with no financial stake in the music industry) seriously believed the claims of the music executives that this "piracy" was going to destroy music and needed to be stopped.

So ask the students how they feel about AI?

> 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.

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.

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.

I joined CS education in 2000. There were jobs everywhere. Classmates were leaving after a few months, or working part-time. And this was in Sweden. It was not only creating jobs, but reinventing the IT field, creating lots more opportunities.

Today, the message is that (Dear leaders,) your workers can be replaced by machines. Not that you together can do more with this new tool, but that you can slim down your operation. Maybe I'm just older, but the optimism I saw then is now divided into opportunity (AI consultants) and skepticism (workers.)

This is a narrative the AI industry created, because they want to tap into the huge salary money pool. They tell a story of anti-innovation cost-cutting rather than "do more with these tools."

>no computer network will change the way government works.

Well, they were right on that one.

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