It is 1995.
Your computer modem screeches as it tries to connect to something called the internet. Maybe it works. Maybe you try again.
For the first time in history, you can exchange letters with someone across the world in seconds. Only 2000-something websites exist, so you could theoretically visit them all over a weekend. Most websites are just text on gray backgrounds with the occasional pixelated image. Loading times are brutal. A single image takes a minute, a 1-minute video could take hours. Most people do not trust putting their credit cards online. The advice everyone gives: don’t trust strangers on the internet.
People split into two camps very soon.
Optimists predict grand transformations. Some believe digital commerce will overtake physical retail within years. Others insist we’ll wander around in virtual reality worlds.
“I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes.” - Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Professor, 1993
Pessimists call the internet a fad and a bubble.
Source : Did Paul Krugman Say the Internet’s Effect on the World Economy Would Be ‘No Greater Than the Fax Machine’s’? Snopes, 2018. Original quote in Red Herring magazine, 1998
If you told the average person in 1995 that within 25 years, we’d consume news from strangers on social media over newspapers, watch shows on-demand in place of cable TV, find romantic partners through apps more than through friends, and flip “don’t trust strangers on the internet” so completely that we’d let internet strangers pick us up in their personal vehicles and sleep in their spare bedrooms, most people would find that hard to believe.
We’re in 1995 again. This time with Artificial Intelligence.
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