The interesting thing (to me) about the dotcom bubble, pointed out in one of pg's essays, is how much it got right.
It was right about the economic potential of the www. 20 years later and it is as big a deal as 1999 pundits predicted. It was right that the big winners would be very big, very fast. Google, FB Alibaba, amazon... Bigger than any tech company in 99. It was right about winning early and establishing dominant position... letting network effects and the scaling power of software and the web go to work.
Unfortunately for binary outcomes.. getting 4/5 things right is still a wipeout.
The bubble was slightly off about timing. More big winners were founded/determined in the 5 years after the bubble than during it. It slightly overestimated early mover advantage.. closely related to the timing mistake.
If that bubble is the model for this one... interesting times ahead.
And the reason why the dotcom timing was off was because the internet hadn't already permeated everyday life. That's when the network effect paid off and consolidation merged startups into giants.
Will the same happen to AI? Uses of AI and "AI" seem to take very well to today's world. Everybody wants a piece of the action be it in ad networks, big data, surveillance, cat ear filters or fake nude pics. People are much more technologically literate and the concept in any form will not land in barren land. It's sometimes even frustrating the way people expect a certain level of intelligence from basic applications (eg. try to implement a search function that is not error-flexible and you'll get angry comments).
Internet paved the way to having lots of redundant data we don't know what to do with. I think the world is all too ready to welcome advances in AI, and it's in fact ignored what it will do to financial systems or personal lives.
At least in terms of zeitgeist, it feels like a turning point of some sort when the main conversations around "what does ai even mean?" started to go in a more concrete "can we get it to do this?" direction. It's increasingly becoming a part of of life, even mundane.^ A camera becomes obviously expected to understand who or what it's taking pictures of.
^great example, btw. auto complete and search captures it.
It was right about the economic potential of the www. 20 years later and it is as big a deal as 1999 pundits predicted. It was right that the big winners would be very big, very fast. Google, FB Alibaba, amazon... Bigger than any tech company in 99. It was right about winning early and establishing dominant position... letting network effects and the scaling power of software and the web go to work.
Unfortunately for binary outcomes.. getting 4/5 things right is still a wipeout.
The bubble was slightly off about timing. More big winners were founded/determined in the 5 years after the bubble than during it. It slightly overestimated early mover advantage.. closely related to the timing mistake.
If that bubble is the model for this one... interesting times ahead.