Were we always fearful of information technology? I was wondering that recently as I considered the current wave of hysteria over A.I. I know in the 80s there was a fear of people losing their jobs due to PCs in the office. In the 90s there was a fear of people using the Internet to easily build bombs in the same way the Oklahoma bombers did. I am sure that in each decade of computing since then, people feared something due to new technology.
It seems that the fears of IT goes hand in hand with the possibilities of the new IT. The 90s was the decade of networking: networking of PCs in offices via LANs connected to each other by a network of networks (a/k/a the Internet). In a short time we had so much more capability and more information than we previously had: much of it good, some of it very bad. While adapting to using the new technology and the information it brought, we adapted to the new fears that arose from some of this information. Fears like bombers everywhere.
Some day there will be a good history of computing in our current era and the fear will be put into context. Personally, I am not fearful because I suspect the A.I. of our current era will suffer the same fate as A.I. did in the early 90s. I posted this on Bluesky recently:
My only thoughts on AI are the ones I’ve had from the beginning: 1) gen AI will experience the “AI effect” 2) no one will talk about gen AI after the next “AI winter” occurs (timing depends on next American recession)
— Bernie Michalik (@berniemichalik.ca) August 21, 2026 at 8:49 PM
The AI effect and AI winter happened back in the 90s to the AI work being done back then. The same thing will happen to gen AI in this time.
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