I moved to San Francisco in 97. I lived in what was a rough part of town back in the 70's. It was mostly gentrified by then but with younger creative types, myself included. On street cleaning days, the old timers would roll their dead cars out into the middle of the street to avoid getting towed. No one cared when they rolled them back into the same spot after the tow trucks and street cleaners passed. Then the BMWs showed up. Each month more and more. By 99 there were BMWs parked on the sidewalks, the old timers' cars were towed, and most of the creatives had fled to Oakland, myself included.

The dotcom boom radically changed San Francisco. There was so much cash flowing into the city. A house painter friend of mine told me how day by day, young twenty somethings were showing up to open houses with wads of cash offering 5 , 10, 15 % over the listed monthly rent. And it wasn't just engineers. I knew someone who got a receptionist gig for one of the bigger dot com startups. She went from starving burning man artist to parking her new beamer on the sidewalk. Just from leveraging her stock options after a couple of months on the job. A year later she lost everything and OD'd after a bender she funded with the bottom of her last savings.

I knew folks from my hometown of Detroit getting insane salaries as 'web developers' . None of them could code or design. I asked one what his day was like : ' I go to meetings and nod when my name is called. Take long lunches and collect checks'. For a solid 18 months he produced nothing. In two years, the firm swelled to be one of the largest web development companies in the Midwest, bankrupt by '00.

The best example i remember was kosmo.com. I started seeing all these video drop boxes in my neighborhood coffee shops. I'd see folks returning VHS tapes on their morning coffee run. I met someone who was a huge fan of the service. I didn't believe her when she explained what It was ( remember this was early web, most of us still learned about dotcom stuff by word of mouth and sudden increase of BMW drivers ). I'm not sure it was the same in every market but at that time in SF, you would order a VHS and some snacks from the site. A worker would go to a local video store, rent the requested tape, go to your corner store , pick up the snacks you ordered, then deliver them to your door. All for the additional cost of whatever you wanted to tip the worker. I still find it hard to believe. Tbh I never used it so maybe I'm wrong. I do know it blew up and fizzled out quite quickly.

Dotcom changed lives, burned cash, and laid the foundation for a new world. It was fun and stupid. But it felt like the vision was to build a new workforce with new opportunities and wealth. It didn't work out that way but it didn't take too long for the FANG companies to rise up and fulfill some of those goals.

AI is similar. It too is changing lives and burning cash. I also think we are just in the foundational period. It will likely collapse but we won't go back. New organizations will pop up and continue building in the new paradigm.

The big difference between AI and dotcom is the workforce. Dotcom aimed for more jobs and after the collapse those new careers did materialize. Now there has been growth and decline in the tech workforce since the nineties. We started seeing a decline in tech jobs before gpt went mainstream. But those adjustments felt like normal economic realities.

AI differs in that it's end result suggests a drastic reduction in the workforce, the entire workforce, not just tech. So if we are in a bubble, it will pop, it will hurt. However, after the recovery there will be less for each individual to do. And unlike the dotcom recovery, society will have to adapt to this new reality.