The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
- Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, in 1998, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/(Why do people try to criticise AI as "probabalistic" like this matters? Unreliable I get, but early Wikipedia and Geocities were as deterministically unreliable as the amateur and fiction sections respectively of a bookstore)
An economist exytrpolating tech trends is already a hard sell. And deterministic unreliability is atleast deterministic meaning you can choose to ignore, this is still better than probabilistic AI hubris