1995: no Google, no Web, no mobile phone, no blockchain. The Internet was just a limited set of academic networks and, for some, a mere dream of a possible “global village.”

From that point on, the Internet and the digital era radically transformed everything in human society—from how we shop, date, get our news, play, work, learn, to how we travel and communicate with each other. The digital era reshaped information, communication, education, business. There’s not a single human activity that was untouched. Not a single industry that escaped disruption.

Yet back then, most people—including experts, politicians, and prominent journalists—didn’t see the tsunami coming. Most were in total disbelief.

In 1995, I wrote in my first book that “Internet will become the electricity of the 21st century.” But soon after, I remember being publicly mocked by several high-profile French media moguls, explaining to me that I was “a dreamer,” that “the Internet will never work.” Later on, they called it a “bubble,” or tried to fight it with absurd claims like, “the Internet is only for criminals and pedophiles.” And when I launched a web magazine called Mobinet in the late 1990s, the first entirely devoted to the new possibilities of the coming digital mobile networks—long before smartphones appeared—I had the CEO of a national mobile operator telling me he had “no clue whatsoever” what I meant with “mobile Internet,” something he even called “a speculation.”

The story goes on.

In my 30-year career as an author and journalist, I’ve heard, year after year and always from supposedly smart, educated, well-informed people:

• “The Internet is dead”
• “Nobody will ever buy books online”
• “Amazon is dead”
• “Apple is dead”
• “Nobody needs a mobile phone”
• “Blockchain is a bubble”
• “NFTs are dead”
• “Why are you even writing about robots?”
• “Bitcoin is for criminals”
• “Bitcoin is dead”

Is this just reluctance to change? I don’t think so. There’s a kind of romance in being a skeptic. People feel clever doubting the new. There’s a strange intellectual vanity in declaring that something won’t work—especially when it threatens to upend your worldview or your career. But it’s more than just reluctance. It’s blindness. A deep, systemic inability to grasp how technology scales—how fast it can evolve, how deep it can cut, how silent and sudden disruption can be. Even the most obviously revolutionary ideas are treated like temporary fads—right up until they eat the world.

Very few understood what was coming in 1995. But the transformation happened—massive, irreversible, total.

History repeating itself

The same thing is happening now, with AI.

To me—and to many others paying attention—it is absolutely clear that AI will (and should) have a profound, irreversible effect on human society. It will transform services, industries, creative fields, governance, knowledge work, human relationships, and personal identity itself. And the scale of transformation will be even greater than what happened during the digital shift of the past 30 years.

It’s already happening. Students are using AI tutors more effectively than classrooms. Coders are pairing with LLMs to write software in minutes. Entire companies run customer support with no human staff. Designers create prototypes with a few words. Law firms automate contract writing. Therapists are being supplemented—sometimes replaced—by emotionally aware chatbots. Personalized medicine is taking a leap with AI-driven diagnostics and drug discovery. Even the way we write, draw, speak, think—is evolving. This is not a tool. It’s a new interface between humans and reality. And when we consider what is already possible today, trying to imagine the future brings vertigo. Can you imagine what ChatGPT will be capable of in 20 years?

Yet, just like with the Internet or with Bitcoin, some people remain in denial. Or worse, they actively try to block it. The same class of “smart” people using the same tactics: exaggeration, fear, appeals to morality, dystopian speculation. Anything to avoid accepting the obvious.

Am I myself exaggerating here? I don’t think so.

I just heard a well-known, highly educated eco-activist on a major national media outlet call AI “an unnecessary gadget,” arguing that the money invested in AI should go to forest management instead (I may have hurt myself face-palming). A few days before, I watched a journalist on national TV mock a political leader who dared to mention AI: with a smug tone, he quipped something about “robots picking strawberries?”—as if the idea were laughable science-fiction (apparently, he missed the memo—robots that pick fruits, including strawberries, are not only real but already operating at industrial scale).

Not long before that, I had to endure a senior editorial figure explaining—still on national television—how Elon Musk is trying to “enslave us all” through AI, Mars colonization, and “chip implants in the heads of the dumb people we are.” “It’s urgent to resist,” she seemed to suggest.

And I read daily op-eds warning of AI “destroying jobs,” “killing creativity,” “ending truth,” “spreading misinformation.” As if these weren’t the exact same phrases used about the Internet in the 1990s.

I’m not saying there is no danger in AI, of course. But going through any kind of legacy media today, it’s as if AI was only dangerous, only negative, only some sort of insane idea pushed by a few billionnaires to make more money. What about addressing the potential benefits of AI instead? And why not have a serious public debate on how we could really transform society with this, for the benefits of all?

But I can barely name five politicians—in France, and even across the entire democratic world—who seem to actually understand what’s unfolding. Most are asleep, stalling, or stuck into obsolete debates. And most laws being discussed today treat AI, at best, like it’s a digital product. It’s not—far, far from it. AI is a new substrate for civilization.

History is repeating itself. Once again, most people are missing the plot. The same blindness, the same disbelief, the same tired script.

AI is not a passing trend. It’s not just another app or industry. It’s a civilizational shift—a new layer of intelligence permeating everything. Like the Internet before it, it will be mocked, feared, fought—and then, suddenly, it will be everywhere. I even predicted long ago that the expression “AI” will vanish. Soon, it will sound totally natural that all apps, all devices, all systems, everything that surrounds us or we interact with, will integrate or embed some level of “intelligence,” able to “understand” us.

You can resist it, regulate it, rant against it. But you won’t stop it: AI will transform society more deeply than digital ever did.

Co-written by Cyril Fievet and ChatGPT (v. 4o).

Illustration by StableDiffusion (through Replicate) with the main prompt: “an abstract 3D digital illustration representing the future”