I was alive when the internet was not a thing and remember my neighbor getting a beefy hotrod 486 which was significantly faster than my 286 I scrapped together a lot of money for as a kid.

I liken AI to more like sewing machines.

Lets say our factory output was 10 tshirts a day by hand sewing. When sewing machines came around, we din't make 10 tshirts by 8:30am, send everyone home and pat ourselves on the back. Instead we just increased output per worker and kept investing. This drove the cost of goods way down, to the point where a negative pressure equilibrium was reached in the market: making tshirts any cheaper you'd have to give them away (which, 100 years ago was an absolutely absurd proposal, yet today is so common its sort of laughable). This lead to people moving out of the industry but new people moved in (industrial and chemical engineers, material scientists, technicians, mechanics etc).

In my mind, CEOs that are firing their staff are:

1. Making up for past over-hiring mistakes during Covid

2. Cashing future investment in for today's temporary gains.

Pure-software people didn’t exist; it was always someone who was a statistician, a geologist, a chemist, who was also ‘good at computers’ because it was a skill they cultivated along the way. As a result, most software was highly specialized and arcane. Way too expensive to be a toy.

Early tools like Lotus 1-2-3 and dbase were mind-blowing because they were so generalized and available on consumer appliances. Schools managed milk money, farmers planned crops, the perceived value was instant. There wasn’t an activity that couldn’t benefit.

Back then one computer with a spreadsheet and database was considered more than enough to grow ‘any’ entrepreneurial enterprise from zero to 200 employees. Even in the late 90s I was in a ~300 person multi-national that mostly ran on one Novell server and the entire company lived in Lotus Notes.

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