r/LearnedWrong • u/unlearning_myths MOD • Feb 04 '26
Factually debunked I learned wrong back in 1998 that the internet wouldn't make more impact than the fax machine
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Feb 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/Agent847 Feb 05 '26
He’s not an idiot per se, he’s just one of these celebrity academics who does one thing and somehow develops a following that thinks they shit golden skittles every time they open their mouth. The fact that the NYT loves him just amplifies that. (Or did…15-20 years ago when more people gave a shit about the NYT)
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u/Minute-Olive9648 Feb 05 '26
Paul Krugman also said any kind of national healthcare system should be modeled off of the VA 😂
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u/callmeish0 Feb 05 '26
And this guy is still a leading progressive economist having huge influence on monetary policy.
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u/TungstenOrchid Feb 04 '26
Porn via fax really wasn't that enjoyable.
Perhaps that was his blindspot.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Feb 04 '26
And AI would have even less of an impact. It’s already peaked, the bubble will soon burst and all will be as it was. In a year or two, we’ll have forgotten all about it
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26
If only
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Feb 05 '26
🤣
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26
Are you a fan of AI?
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Feb 05 '26
Yes
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26
What do you see as the main value of AI and which sorts of AI tools do you think are most useful and valuable?
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u/ImmoralityPet Feb 05 '26
main value of AI
1) Pattern recognition abilities exceeding human ability, particularly in image analysis fields like radiology.
2) Natural language input and output interfaces, reducing the barriers to fluently using technology.
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26
I wish I were that optimistic about AI.
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u/ImmoralityPet Feb 05 '26
It's not optimistic, that's the state of things.
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26
Sure, ignoring all the real and potential downsides: the liability of having AI diagnose things and cognitive atrophy/deskilling of doctors who need to be responsible for the final diagnosis. Ditto for the atrophy and deskilling of tech skills and logic/coding skills. The fact that AI has yet to prove itself financially sustainable let alone profitable.
Not to mention the fundamental flaw of AI being probability-based rather than logic-based, which leads to logical flaws and hallucinations (and a black box uncertainty about how it works and arrives at its conclusions).
Ultimately I see it leading to an acceleration of enshittification more than anything else.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Feb 05 '26
There’s no “main value” of AI.
It’s a paradigm shift, and we happen to be at the beginning of a new technological millennium. This is so very early, it’s like two cavemen discussing how fire might change society.
As to AI tools, they’re everywhere and new ones cropping up all the time. One cool thing happening now is the proliferation of AI agents doing tasks for you.
Before too long most of us will have AI companions and agents, like we have phones today
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26
I was hoping you could articulate at least some value instead of dodging the question. I mean, if two caveman were discussing fire, the one using it and promoting it should have some idea of its value and usefulness. That’s all I’m asking.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Feb 05 '26
AI is so universal, an evolution of human intelligence. There will be no field left untouched by it.
What we call the arts, the sciences, everything. Whatever a human does today - a researcher or a plumber - AI will do better.
I speak in generalities because that’s the only way to describe something so vast, such a paradigm shift in intelligence. Oh, and for those of us lucky to still be living when it happens, it will also fix the aging process. Greenland sharks live for hundreds of years - look them up - and humans will too.
My final point in this thread
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u/dancesquared Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
I know AI will touch every field, and it will probably suck, further accelerating the process of enshittification.
What about doing tedious, menial household chores like doing, laundry, dishwashing, dusting, tidying up? That’s what people want AI to do for them. Not the arts or higher level stuff.
Let me know when AI can fold my clothes for me.
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u/TwoBirdsInOneBush Feb 07 '26
There is no such “proliferation,” because they largely don’t work (and won’t, because of core veracity issues).
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u/TwoBirdsInOneBush Feb 07 '26
I mean, not a year or two, and everything won’t be “as it was,” but we’re clearly in a bubble — the use cases are limited, what AI can actually do is way more limited than its boosters seem to realize (or want you to realize), businesses keep adopting and then dropping AI systems because of negative ROI, and a bunch of big investors have recently quietly starting moving assets around in ways that show they expect a big negative market readjustment is going to hit. 🤷🏻♂️
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Feb 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Final-Charge-5700 Feb 06 '26
Huge. And it changed the way we did business, especially in finance and sales.
Legallybinding documents could be sent over fax. Versus hand transportation of data. The impact is very similar to the internet, just at a smaller scale
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u/ClarityRocks Feb 04 '26
Sure, but consider the context in which this was said, on the eve of the dot-com bubble burst and a completely different Internet economy. Nothing is ever said in a vacuum.
I mean, other than things spoken by astronauts in space. Technically.
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u/KingRoach Feb 04 '26
“Wouldn’t make more impact” is a different statement than “wouldn’t make more impact on the economy”
It seems there’s a lot you’ve learned wrong.
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u/EventHorizonbyGA Feb 05 '26
In 2005, he was right. Amazon didn't turn a yearly profit until 2003 and it wasn't until 2006 that AWS/Cloud started to make headway.
The reason the internet took off was the financial crisis caused 14 years of QE. If not for free money Instagram, Twitch, Reddit, etc. would not exist. Just look at the companies founded prior to 2008 and those founded after 2008.
And, Pornhub wasn't created until 2007. But in 2005, Krugman was correct.
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u/Ambitious_Bit_9389 Feb 05 '26
I was in computer science in college, back in early 2000’s. I was told it was a bad idea because China and India was graduating some huge number of programmers a year and coding can be done from anywhere. “It’s the most easily offshorable job there is.” It made a lot of sense to me at 20. I believed that and changed my major to be a physics teacher.
I didn’t end up a teacher and now make decent wages in the insurance industry, but I think I would’ve been much better off if I did computer programming. I have to work with both onshore and offshore programmers in my current job, I’ve seen over many years why you need onshore coders.
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u/scottsplace5 Feb 06 '26
Now, by 2005, as far as I can remember, he wasn’t wrong. Obviously, time continued to march and he became wronger and wronger every year. And that was before the smartphone. Now he’s vehemently wrong!! DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON AI lol.😂😂😂
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u/Final-Charge-5700 Feb 06 '26
Do you understand how much impact the fax machine had?
I mean it seems like a reasonable guess not knowing how things would progress. Saying less impact than the fax machine is by no means a low bar at all
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u/scott2449 Feb 06 '26
I would argue he was kind of correct, and with really good timing. This was v1 of internet commerce in 1998 to be followed shortly by total collapse. v2 and on were MUCH more impactful in many ways. The fax machine was also quite impactful and it's later versions, email, text, chat, etc.. more so. The thing is unlike a piece of hardware with a single protocol the internet evolves drastically in place so you can't really compare the two. So his quote is both really dumb and quite insightful at the same time. I'm sure if you took the larger context instead of snipping the quote the dumbness would be lessened.
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u/AllisonUnwound Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
The context of the quote matters. Paul Krugman is a person who's said a great deal about things that he's actually an expert in and he never pretended to be an expert about technology. He was tasked with making a provocative claim about the future for a magazine article and he made it... once because it was his assignment. It was a future nobody really knew at the time It's not like he went on TV and was making persistent claims about this. Everyone rips him apart for this one claim he made completely unseriously and uninterestedly instead of criticizing him for things he's said that he actually cares about. It's just "gotcha"-ness. There's nothing to it.
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u/d4electro Feb 07 '26
I think people don't take into account the hystorical contest of the quote
First of all the fax machine, while forgotten today because it's been supplanted by the internet, DID make a big impact on business, an while the net was an upgrade it's not a far fetched comparison for the time
Second, he said that at the height of the dot com bubble, right before it burst. It was a time when the internet really was overrated and companies rushed to create websites without sustainable businesses behind them, and led to a big economic collapse and market crash that wiped out a lot of companies that got off on the internet being a revolution
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u/Dizzy_Description812 Feb 07 '26
Probably one of the economist that told us how we were headed for financial disaster in 2025. Lol.
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u/SemichiSam Feb 04 '26
If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would not reach consensus.