Tom Goodwin on AI panic: the internet promised radical change too, and arrived painfully slowly
DanGrover · x · 2026-11-12
Tom Goodwin riffs on waitbutwhy's classic loop of reading AI news, panicking, going outside, doubting himself, then panicking again. His counterpoint uses internet history: early net optimists assumed email would make us hyper-efficient, cloud docs would kill meetings, online shopping would destroy 90% of retailers, and middlemen would evaporate. Twenty years later, planes still carry paperwork and dot-matrix printers, healthcare runs on fax machines and CDs, and corporate inventory systems remain terrible. Change is extremely slow and pretty illogical.
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