Douglas Adams:

  1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

  2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

  3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

This was penned in the distant, dial-up days of 1999, when the Internet1 was at the stage that AI is now2.

This quote—and the entire article—holds up remarkably well in the context of AI. Given the massive societal change barreling towards us at breakneck speed, it’s worth examining how the world adapted to the upheaval that the Internet brought and, more importantly, how most people couldn’t foresee how things would pan out.

Footnotes

  1. Capitalised-I ↩

  2. 1999 was five years from what could be considered the Internet’s epoch—the launch of the Netscape Navigator; it’s been just two and a half years since AI’s unarguable epoch—the launch of ChatGPT. But 2025 feels like 1999 when you look at the hype circle; I do hope 2026 doesn’t end up feeling like 2000! ↩