Mobile phones was what changed society, not the web or the dot com era.

Almost everyone had a computer in their home before we had smartphones, those computers did shape society in a massive way. You didn't see them on the streets like you do phones but the effects were still just as massive.

At the time I had to read slashdot on my work computer because I had no intenet or a new computer able to connect to it.

Not even all geeks had it.

Almost everyone, not everyone, majority of households in USA had a computer already by year 2000, and that is counting old people without kids who didn't keep up with trends.

So by the time smart phones hit almost everyone had a computer at home. If you are talking about the 90s that isn't relevant, the relevant part is how smart phones changed things, and at that time internet was already available to a large majority at home, smart phones just made it portable.

I just looked it up. In the 2000:

50% households in US had computer at home. 36% had internet access.

I love when people reply wuth shit they have no fucking idea.

'Almost everyone' was a very select group even in the 2000s. Look at reddit discourse post cheap postpaid internet phones versus before.

The internet connected computer in the home was a productivity tool. Even just gaming required gamers to become pretty PC/OS/tech savvy. Cheap postpaid internet phones are bread and circuses. They two have different effects on society.

If AI improved as quickly as hardware used to do then most of these efforts would succeed, since what would have been on the horizon of plausibility one year would be very easy to do a year or two later.

But that improvement didn't come, the technology plateaued so most of these efforts failed.