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Coincidentally, back in 1996 I had an economics professor that expressed this exact sentiment during a lecture. He was convinced the internet was a fad that wou

Coincidentally, back in 1996 I had an economics professor that expressed this exact sentiment during a lecture. He was convinced the internet was a fad that would be gone in a few years. I found it really puzzling that someone so educated who seemed more familiar with technology than the average person couldn't see - or more accurately feel - the impact the internet was going to have. The second I went online and tried a random chat website, I knew that what I was witnessing was rudimentary but would become revolutionary, and most people around me felt the same.

raverbashing 4y ago
I think education does not have much to do with it. Rather, it's creativity and curiosity. Sci-fi authors could have imagined much more. People who think "it's just a fad" can't think much beyond what it's being shown there and see what's really going on behind and how this can grow. In a way, they were not criticizing "the internet". They were criticizing mIRC, or some site best viewed with Netscape 1.0 and thinking that's where it ended. But of course that's where it begins
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  > Sci-fi authors could have imagined much more. They did - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is basically Wikipedia on a tablet. Well, except that the authors are volunteers, the device can do a lot more, and it doesn't have the calming words on its cover.
havblue 4y ago
I can imagine that he reversed his opinion as the dotcom bubble inflated until about 2000, only to reverse it again after the bubble popped, only to reverse it again...
- feet 4y ago
  Ah yes, the rigorous study of economics
  - pxx 4y ago
    A successful businessman, visiting his alma mater, dropped in on the economics professor. Recalling that he used to have trouble with economics exams, he asked to see some of the current papers. Noting them casually, he observed, “These are the same old questions!” “Yes,” agreed the prof, “we never change the questions.” “But,” objected the visitor, “don’t you know the students will pass the questions on from class to class?” “Certainly,” was the bland response. “But in economics we are constantly changing the answers.”
eterps 4y ago
> The second I went online and tried a random chat website, I knew that what I was witnessing was rudimentary but would become revolutionary By witnessing a chat website you immediately grasped that the internet (web) is something dynamic, not static. The economics professor probably had a different perception of the internet at that time, thinking web pages were static documents (in a way similiar to a fax).
- dekervin 4y ago
  The question that spring to mind is, when do you know if an information technology is more like the telephone or more like the fax. Also is there some clear consensus on the impact of the telephone had on the economy ?
- mywittyname 4y ago
  In some ways, this is the curse of early adoption. It's often the case with emerging technology that the use-cases for it start off as slightly more efficient ways of doing things. It can be hard to see past those use cases, especially when you work in a different field. Said professor probably saw the internet has more of a fancy distributed library system. Without working with the underlying technology, it can be hard to see how something will flesh out. Early iterations of tech often sucks. It's easy to dismiss technology that barely works as unlikely to overcome the major hurdles it is encountering. Think: self-driving cars.
citizenpaul 4y ago
Then you don't understand modern (last 50y) academia. It rewards gatekeeping, turf-guarding, outsider exclusion, shunning changes and bible thumping. Its the reason that there have not really been any revolutionary advancements in a long time. Everyone is hyper focused on guarding their own expertise and writing papers to "prove" it. Even if it is not necessary and most of the time no one except a reviewer will ever read the XXXXth paper on a slightly different version of a topic that has been covered a million times. The work is as immaculate as it is pointless.
vl 4y ago
My professor in 1998 was saying that whatever we had then was the last technological advancement of chip production because it was not possible to make elements smaller due to the length of light waves, and CPUs are not going to get faster. 25 years later...
- tanbog6 4y ago
  To be fair, clock speeds have not really gone up in the last 20 years or so. Multi core CPUs and speedups in other bottlenecks on the other hand..
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Your professor was 100% correct: chips haven't been getting faster, though, and for precisely the reasons they stated. However, parallelizing work onto separate cores turned out to continue to extend performance, so it didn't matter so much. That said, I feel like there were many things that were faster 25 years ago than now, so even multicore hyper-threaded CPU improvements are being chewed up by software doing more. Still, that's a separate issue.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I had to dig out an old Pentium 4 Dell machine this weekend to work with some old hardware. 1 DIMM and a SCSI card had died in the 12 years it was powered off, but it worked just fine with 256MB of memory. Mostly as responsive as a modern machine, but you could tell when the 20 year old spinning drive had to chug a bit to load things. And I seem to still be able to navigate WinXP with no issues - no weather or ad widgets loading under my mouse cursor; it was actually a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure if that's nostalgia/familiarity or if it was really more useable. I've also heard non tech people complain about how clear it is that each Windows version is just a shabby coat of paint over the last version and they wish Microsoft would just stop, so I don't think it's just me. I have to imagine XP would fly on a current machine with multiple gigs of RAM and an SSD.
  - vl 4y ago
    Not at all. In 1998 there was 0.25 um, ie 250 nm process, now we have 5 nm process. 50x improvement. In 1998 processors were ~100MHz, now we have 2-4GHz. 20x-40x improvement. Modern chips are incredibly faster even on the single core. You couldn’t get anything close to modern smartphone on 1998 technology.
coldtea 4y ago
Well, from the point of view of economics, he wasn't far off regarding minimal impact: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Danny-Quah/publication/228973453/figure/fig1/AS:339952786264077@1458062468556/World-GDP-growth-after-1997-indicates-a-slowdown-relative-to-earlier-trend-The.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Danny-Quah/publication/... The econonic impact of the internet (aside from how many "industries it trasnformed" and so on) is the mere continuation of the earlier GDP trends. And if we go back, we see that the real turning point (with which the internet era change can't even compete) was the steam/oil/industrial revolution combo circa 19th century: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e8ee3a46d7cd36d4dc451f2834128398 https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e8ee3a46d7cd36d4dc451...
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
  Does this analysis account for the acceleration of scientific inquiry and the follow-on benefits?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    When it comes to people and papers published, yes. But There's not much "acceleration of scientific inquiry" as it pertains to results. If anything it's a slowdown after the 60s-70s, an acceleration in BS papers and incremental updates, but lack of real big discoveries. Consider discoveries like: steam engine, combustion engine, jet engine, electricity, "the germ theory of disease", vaccines, surgery, x-rays, laser, nuclear power, airplane, car, air conditioning, fridge, digital computer, reinforced concrete, spectometer, synthesizer, transistors, DNA, etc. Including of course the digital computer, the personal computer, the OS, the command line, the UI, the mouse, the internet, Lisp and Smalltalk. Here's a take: https://news.uchicago.edu/scientific-progress-slowing-james-evans https://news.uchicago.edu/scientific-progress-slowing-james-... Here's another: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEBsj18Y4NnVx5Qdu43cKEHMaVBODTTyfHBa8GIRSec/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEBsj18Y4NnVx5Qdu43cKEHM... But the real pulpit imho is having captured the low hanging fruits.
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This, and the original article are likely a riff on the Solow paradox from 1987: > "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox It always seemed crazy to me, but as far as I'm aware the invention of computers didn't seem to have a noticeable effect on their economic measures of productivity.

raverbashing 4y ago

I think education does not have much to do with it. Rather, it's creativity and curiosity. Sci-fi authors could have imagined much more. People who think "it's just a fad" can't think much beyond what it's being shown there and see what's really going on behind and how this can grow. In a way, they were not criticizing "the internet". They were criticizing mIRC, or some site best viewed with Netscape 1.0 and thinking that's where it ended. But of course that's where it begins

bornfreddy 4y ago
> Sci-fi authors could have imagined much more. They did - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is basically Wikipedia on a tablet. Well, except that the authors are volunteers, the device can do a lot more, and it doesn't have the calming words on its cover.

havblue 4y ago

I can imagine that he reversed his opinion as the dotcom bubble inflated until about 2000, only to reverse it again after the bubble popped, only to reverse it again...

feet 4y ago
Ah yes, the rigorous study of economics
- pxx 4y ago
  A successful businessman, visiting his alma mater, dropped in on the economics professor. Recalling that he used to have trouble with economics exams, he asked to see some of the current papers. Noting them casually, he observed, “These are the same old questions!” “Yes,” agreed the prof, “we never change the questions.” “But,” objected the visitor, “don’t you know the students will pass the questions on from class to class?” “Certainly,” was the bland response. “But in economics we are constantly changing the answers.”

eterps 4y ago

> The second I went online and tried a random chat website, I knew that what I was witnessing was rudimentary but would become revolutionary By witnessing a chat website you immediately grasped that the internet (web) is something dynamic, not static. The economics professor probably had a different perception of the internet at that time, thinking web pages were static documents (in a way similiar to a fax).

dekervin 4y ago
The question that spring to mind is, when do you know if an information technology is more like the telephone or more like the fax. Also is there some clear consensus on the impact of the telephone had on the economy ?
mywittyname 4y ago
In some ways, this is the curse of early adoption. It's often the case with emerging technology that the use-cases for it start off as slightly more efficient ways of doing things. It can be hard to see past those use cases, especially when you work in a different field. Said professor probably saw the internet has more of a fancy distributed library system. Without working with the underlying technology, it can be hard to see how something will flesh out. Early iterations of tech often sucks. It's easy to dismiss technology that barely works as unlikely to overcome the major hurdles it is encountering. Think: self-driving cars.

citizenpaul 4y ago

Then you don't understand modern (last 50y) academia. It rewards gatekeeping, turf-guarding, outsider exclusion, shunning changes and bible thumping. Its the reason that there have not really been any revolutionary advancements in a long time. Everyone is hyper focused on guarding their own expertise and writing papers to "prove" it. Even if it is not necessary and most of the time no one except a reviewer will ever read the XXXXth paper on a slightly different version of a topic that has been covered a million times. The work is as immaculate as it is pointless.

vl 4y ago

My professor in 1998 was saying that whatever we had then was the last technological advancement of chip production because it was not possible to make elements smaller due to the length of light waves, and CPUs are not going to get faster. 25 years later...

tanbog6 4y ago
To be fair, clock speeds have not really gone up in the last 20 years or so. Multi core CPUs and speedups in other bottlenecks on the other hand..
pwinnski 4y ago
Your professor was 100% correct: chips haven't been getting faster, though, and for precisely the reasons they stated. However, parallelizing work onto separate cores turned out to continue to extend performance, so it didn't matter so much. That said, I feel like there were many things that were faster 25 years ago than now, so even multicore hyper-threaded CPU improvements are being chewed up by software doing more. Still, that's a separate issue.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I had to dig out an old Pentium 4 Dell machine this weekend to work with some old hardware. 1 DIMM and a SCSI card had died in the 12 years it was powered off, but it worked just fine with 256MB of memory. Mostly as responsive as a modern machine, but you could tell when the 20 year old spinning drive had to chug a bit to load things. And I seem to still be able to navigate WinXP with no issues - no weather or ad widgets loading under my mouse cursor; it was actually a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure if that's nostalgia/familiarity or if it was really more useable. I've also heard non tech people complain about how clear it is that each Windows version is just a shabby coat of paint over the last version and they wish Microsoft would just stop, so I don't think it's just me. I have to imagine XP would fly on a current machine with multiple gigs of RAM and an SSD.
- vl 4y ago
  Not at all. In 1998 there was 0.25 um, ie 250 nm process, now we have 5 nm process. 50x improvement. In 1998 processors were ~100MHz, now we have 2-4GHz. 20x-40x improvement. Modern chips are incredibly faster even on the single core. You couldn’t get anything close to modern smartphone on 1998 technology.

coldtea 4y ago

Well, from the point of view of economics, he wasn't far off regarding minimal impact: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Danny-Quah/publication/228973453/figure/fig1/AS:339952786264077@1458062468556/World-GDP-growth-after-1997-indicates-a-slowdown-relative-to-earlier-trend-The.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Danny-Quah/publication/... The econonic impact of the internet (aside from how many "industries it trasnformed" and so on) is the mere continuation of the earlier GDP trends. And if we go back, we see that the real turning point (with which the internet era change can't even compete) was the steam/oil/industrial revolution combo circa 19th century: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e8ee3a46d7cd36d4dc451f2834128398 https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e8ee3a46d7cd36d4dc451...

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
Does this analysis account for the acceleration of scientific inquiry and the follow-on benefits?
- coldtea 4y ago
  When it comes to people and papers published, yes. But There's not much "acceleration of scientific inquiry" as it pertains to results. If anything it's a slowdown after the 60s-70s, an acceleration in BS papers and incremental updates, but lack of real big discoveries. Consider discoveries like: steam engine, combustion engine, jet engine, electricity, "the germ theory of disease", vaccines, surgery, x-rays, laser, nuclear power, airplane, car, air conditioning, fridge, digital computer, reinforced concrete, spectometer, synthesizer, transistors, DNA, etc. Including of course the digital computer, the personal computer, the OS, the command line, the UI, the mouse, the internet, Lisp and Smalltalk. Here's a take: https://news.uchicago.edu/scientific-progress-slowing-james-evans https://news.uchicago.edu/scientific-progress-slowing-james-... Here's another: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEBsj18Y4NnVx5Qdu43cKEHMaVBODTTyfHBa8GIRSec/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEBsj18Y4NnVx5Qdu43cKEHM... But the real pulpit imho is having captured the low hanging fruits.
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This, and the original article are likely a riff on the Solow paradox from 1987: > "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox It always seemed crazy to me, but as far as I'm aware the invention of computers didn't seem to have a noticeable effect on their economic measures of productivity.