We need a more sophisticated debate about the impact of the Internet. It has been a failure by any measure, especially given the high hopes we had for it back i

We need a more sophisticated debate about the impact of the Internet. It has been a failure by any measure, especially given the high hopes we had for it back in the 1980s and 1990s. Here is productivity during the 25 years after each date on this graph: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/04/opinion/krugman040423_2/krugman040423_2-jumbo.png?quality=75&auto=webp https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/04/opinion/krugman04... Paul Krugman goes over the numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.... In the 1990s we believed that once knowledge was universal and free it would lead to the biggest economic boom in history. Instead the opposite happened: the economy slowed in the early 2000s, then crashed in 2008, and then the period from 2008 to 2020 was the slowest since the Great Depression. How to reconcile such a failure with the spread of universal knowledge? We need to answer that before we can answer the smaller and more specific questions that surround AI.