Rhyme, and reason
In the early days of the World Wide Web (WWW) cartoonist Peter Steiner created a cartoon depicting a dog seated at a computer console talking to a dog nearby with a caption that read “On the internet, no one knows you are a dog.”
There are parallels between then and now, between emergence of the dot-coms and the emergence of “AI”-enabled applications, so my gut impulse was to say, “There should be an updated version of that cartoon that says ‘With “AI”, no one knows you are a dog.’ ”
Where things diverge
With a few minutes of additional reflection, though, I realized that the situation was quite a bit more complicated, and such a trivial update isn't appropriate. As is aptly said by someone, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” In other words, it's on us to learn lessons, yet not overgeneralize.
To start with, there was a kind of collective innocence in our society at that time that this cartoon captured. We had not yet been exposed to the deluge of pretenders and many saw opportunity in that statement, not cynicism. It seemed that with the power of the internet, and the emerging web, individuals at home could finally become whoever they wanted to be.
But the more I looked, the more I saw bigger differences. For example, the dot-coms were democratizing the world, not centralizing it, creating a collective whole that represented distributed opportunity for a lot of people. The “AI” industry is the opposite—a consolidation, almost like the inverse of the dot-com bubble, taking back the product of all that democratized tech and saying “we can do it all now, thank you very much.” A tech that has trained on the generously offered intellectual wealth of an entire planet now offers to replace that wealth with a single access point to that wealth.
Maybe not all. But they waste no effort saying that with each passing year, it will be smarter. They tell us that if we are not using the tech, we will be left behind. While the dot-coms presented a kind of joy in trying things out, this era is characterized more by a panic, what has been dubbed “FOMO” (fear of missing out), a sense that if you don't join up, you'll be forever left behind.
Never mind that it's the vendors who have the real fear. If “AI” fails, we'll all have to go back to our regular jobs and feeling valued in a globally competitive market again, and they will have nothing to show but a very cool toy—and a lot of debt.
Past promises
In the 1950's, we were promised that The Future was a bright thing with automation that would bring everyone leisure, but now we see a dystopia where jobs are ever at risk and we have to race ever faster just to not get behind.
This tool that does everything is not offered for people to own and develop individually in the way the Internet was. This tool is something very few people are qualified to build themselves, one almost has to rent the service and become completely dependent upon its capability and subservient to its restrictions and pricing. It is extractive, in other words.
The big players market “AI” as something that cannot be done without. Yet if that happens, every company will use this same tool for fear it cannot compete without it, and yet, even as it does this, it will know that its competitors are using the same tool, because no one can afford not to. Is that competitiveness, or the death of competitiveness, or does it even matter?
Clawing forward
And even the issue of “on the internet, no one knows you are a dog” is not the same. Everyone knows. Certainly everyone seeking a job knows “AI” can be asked to puff up their resume, and everyone receiving resumes knows that “AI” can be asked to remove the puffery.
Once it's on both sides, it's not a competitive layer. It's arguably just a tax. You can't not do it, but it may provide little value.
Larger raw capability? Maybe. But that's an untested claim. The public is doing the “research and development” (R&D) here. And not always voluntarily.
Some say there are more products that can be reached. Others counter by noting that the risks along the way will be greater, so there may be bigger problems. Certainly we're not doing a lot to plan for and manage the possibility of such problems.
If history is the Great Teacher, it seems to be asking us to learn from the absence of rhyme where we expect it. Perhaps to expect a different punch line. Something more like, “With ‘AI’, everything has gone to the dogs.”
Author’s Notes:
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This post began as part of another essay I was writing. As sometimes happens, it took on a life of its own, so I spun it off as its own post.
The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5), with light post-processing by me in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download,
