I saw this video on instagram and it got me thinking (which is great because I was due for another blog post). In 1993, the internet was still a curiosity. Mostly academic, mostly niche. There was excitement, sure, but also a kind of obliviousness. Most people had no clue how big it was going to get, or how fast. That same vibe is everywhere now with AI. People keep saying this is “just like the early days of the web.” A pivotal moment. Something that will take off soon.
The internet gave people more access. AI gives machines more ability. That’s not just a new chapter in tech, that’s a shift in who holds the agency.
When the web took off, it helped people do more: read more, share more, build more. With AI, we’re not just doing more… we’re handing over the doing. The artist, the designer, the voice actor, the junior dev, it’s all being collapsed into the interface. One prompt, a few seconds, and done. Some of it’s bad, sure. But some of it’s good enough. And “good enough” is often all that matters at scale.
That’s why the displacement curve feels steeper this time. It’s not just disruption, it’s about compression. Years of craft, instantly simulated. Decades of training, boiled down to “Generate.” And yes, new jobs will probably come out of this, but they already feel more precarious. Less defined. Harder to train for, harder to explain.
We’ve told ourselves AI is “just like the internet” because that makes it feel manageable. Like it’s been done before. But I think we’re underestimating what it means to build a system that’s not about connecting people, it’s about replacing parts of them.
What unsettles me most is how fast we’re trusting it. Voice assistants that sound like your partner. Chatbots that say “trust me, I’m your doctor now.” Tools that don’t just help you think, they start deciding for you. We’re not just giving AI tasks. We’re giving it judgment, and we’re doing it fast.
This moment gives me a kind of digital déjà vu. We charged into the internet with no privacy guardrails and ended up with a surveillance economy. We embraced social media without knowing what it would do to attention, identity, or democracy. We trusted tech companies to be neutral…. and learned they’re not. Now here we are again. Rushing forward, full speed, comforted by the idea that we’ve seen this movie before.
But if AI is “the next internet,” then we should remember: the first one broke a lot of things before it built anything. And this one? This one’s moving faster. With more confidence. Less friction. Higher stakes.