The dotcom bubble was the whole investor industry trying to capitalize on the internet, and they just failed because they were investing everything in a new thing people didn’t need yet.
Today we live in an interconnected world, close to what was promised to the investors back then.
In ten, twenty years, once the bubble, OpenAI, Anthropic and all that are long buried, in what form do you think AI will exist? Do you think it will be an improved version of our current-day LLMs, or a different form of AI? Or do you imagine something else altogether?
I don’t know what will happen, and there’s a lot of bad stuff that could happen, but what I’m excited and hopeful for is an end to software monopolies of all kinds, the replacement of commercial platforms and services with neutral protocols, and people being empowered in ways that cannot be easily suppressed. If we have software that runs on accessible hardware that can enable nearly anyone to create a wide range of personal custom software for themselves, then what purpose it serves is no longer so much decided by corporations and governments. It’s already way more accessible to use Linux as your main PC because LLMs are decent at walking you through how to do what you want with it without being snarky, or requiring developing a deep understanding. I have a growing collection of personal software made with LLM assistance that is useful to me.
The way I optimistically picture using computers in the future is, there will be code libraries that are made to high standards of security, and those will be recombined on the fly by LLMs build-your-own-client style. The results will naturally be devoid of data harvesting or detectable advertisement, because no one would choose to have that stuff if it’s not a package deal. Media feed algorithms will be decided by everyone for themselves, which I’m sure will also have some risks, but surely people can decide for themselves better than Musk and Zuckerberg and the billionaires controlling traditional media can decide for them.
Less optimistically, that all gets shut down by laws and network effects and apathy and our devices are forced with hardware attestation to snitch us out to WW3 killbots. I don’t think our chances of making it are so terrible though.