I was an early adopter of the Internet and never doubted its potential. I was also an early adopter of LLMs and have been much less impressed.

Why not talk about the other side of the coin - things that have been predicted to be amazing and fell flat, like Pets.com and Alexa?

The internet was revolutionary 40 years ago. You could go from no communication to communicating with the whole world.

LLMs goes from coding by myself to shutting down my brain and generating bad code. I don’t see how you can compare both.

Assuming the mean the popular definition of "the internet", it wasn't new 20 years ago. If you want to relate the current state of LLMs, you'd have to go back 30.

And now look at how politically divided most western countries are, how everything is some kind of ad delivery mechanism, how brains get fried by constant attention traps... yeah I'm not sure these people were 100% wrong

Honestly, each year it seems like the value that the internet offers goes down while the harm that it causes goes up.

The enshittification of search and Quora means that outside of Wikipedia and sometimes Reddit, the Internet's offer of "access to all of the world's information" is mostly dead.

With social media becoming a hellscape, people have mostly retreated to semi-private Discord servers; which severely damages the Internet's offer of "participate in a global commons".

There are a few bright spots like easy video sharing. However, I'm not sure I trust them not to get enshittified next.

The internet and smartphones was so revolutionary that growth skyrocketed...oops