People are mad today about AI just like how orchestra musicians and people in that age disliked digital music, called it fake and uncreative. In the 1930s the American Federation of Musicians ran an actual public campaign against what they called "canned music," complete with newspaper ads warning people about machines replacing human players. They had a point. When sound film arrived at the end of the 1920s, the musicians who played live in cinemas, tens of thousands of them in the US alone, lost their work in the space of a few years. Those jobs did not come back.
But the music didn't stop. It moved. And then the same fight happened again with the synthesizer, again with the drum machine, again with the mp3 and Napster, again with streaming, and now again with AI-generated tracks. Every single time, some people lost a living and some people gained a new instrument. Usually not the same people. That's the part that stings, and it's the part we need to realise will come again.
I have a serious love-hate relationship with AI, is this what it felt like in the early days of the dot-com age? The dot-com years as much as it turned out to be a tech bubble, this time changed how we do things up to this day, this platform (Blog/Substack) and this post is a result of that bubble. We are in the early days of AI and I can just but wonder what will people be doing with this technology in the next 10-15 years , like we have seen with most technological cycles, its trash in the beginning but overtime it will become just another tool just like how the internet needed up. But the thing is nobody today can predict what that future looks like so we freak out.
The bubble was a financial event. Careers ended, savings went, entire office parks emptied out. And none of that undid a single thing the boom had built. The fibre laid in those years sat in the ground waiting, and then it became YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, cloud computing, video calls, and eventually the ability for most of us to work from a kitchen table. Amazon fell about 90% and became Amazon anyway.
The shift was something else entirely, and it never reversed. Think about what quietly became normal in those two decades: banking without a branch, shopping without a shop, meeting your partner on an app, learning a trade from strangers on a screen, keeping the whole internet in your pocket. Nobody voted on any of that. It simply became the default, and every one of us reorganised our life around it without noticing.
That is what we’re inside of again, and it’s the part worth paying attention to. Whatever happens to anyone’s share price, the roughly $650 to $725 billion going into AI infrastructure in 2026 alone becomes real data centres, real power stations, real cable in real ground. It doesn’t unbuild itself if the market corrects. And the habits are landing even faster than the concrete: ChatGPT went from not existing in November 2022 to around 900 million weekly users, and its app crossed a billion monthly users in June 2026, the fastest any app in history has got there.
This is the second time I have seen major tech revolution in my lifetime, I didn’t almost notice it, the first time it was not so much of a shock because I was the generation that grew into the age of the internet. Being a 90’s kid this was just what I grew up knowing and people at the time thought the skills I thought as normal and ordinary to learn were new and changed how people worked and created and even impacted their livelihoods.
For me this time it is different and this is because it is changing how things have worked for the past 2-3 decades and what I grew up knowing is being disrupted. AI is impacting how the internet age works and how I have seen the world for all my life. I grew up with tools like photoshop, macromedia mx and flash they felt natural to learn and to translate my creativity like I was using a pencil or a pain brush, I did not know anything else and learning to create with AI and use it just as another tool is a huge shift in just how I think as a whole.
The generation growing into this probably doesn’t care and will adopt AI just like any other tool to create, but for us who can bitch and moan cause it is disrupting us we do so forgetting this is just another point in time in the evolution of humanity. And many points like this will come to challenge comfortable humans in the future.
This is the second major tech revolution I have experienced. The first was hardly a shock; as a 90s kid, I simply grew up alongside the internet. The skills I learned felt entirely natural to me, even as they transformed how the world worked and created.
This time feels different. AI is fundamentally shifting the internet age that has been my default for the past two decades. Learning tools like Photoshop, Macromedia MX, and Flash felt natural back then because I didn't know anything else. Now, learning to create with AI feels like a similar leap.
In the 1970s teachers seriously argued about whether letting a child near one would ruin their arithmetic; by 1980 the national maths teachers' body in the US was recommending calculators at every grade level. Nobody has that argument anymore.
We're at that same point with AI, just louder and much faster. Pew found in early 2026 that 54% of American teens had used a chatbot for schoolwork and 57% had used one to look things up, and 59% of them reckon AI cheating is now a normal feature of school life. ChatGPT went from not existing in November 2022 to roughly 900 million weekly users, and its app crossed a billion monthly users in June 2026, the fastest any app in history has got there. That isn't a trend. That's a new default being installed in real time.
The generation growing into this won't think twice about it. They'll pick it up like a pencil, a calculator, or Google, and they'll be mildly confused that we ever made a thing of it. For those of us old enough to bitch and moan because it's disrupting us, we do it while forgetting that this is just another point in the evolution of humanity. And many more points like this are coming to challenge comfortable humans in the future.
So love-hate it is. I'll keep complaining about AI and keep learning it, sometimes in the same hour, and I've stopped feeling strange about the contradiction. Holding both might be the only honest position available right now.
But here's the thing I keep circling back to. Those musicians in the 1930s were right and wrong at the same time. Right that the jobs were going, and they went, and they never came back. Wrong that the music was ending, because it wasn't. It just stopped needing them in the room. That's the uncomfortable shape of every one of these moments: the loss is real, the world carries on anyway, and both are true on the same Tuesday.
Which makes me think the argument we're all having was never really the argument. Good or bad, bubble or revolution, slop machine or tool: all of that gets settled without asking us, the same way the calculator got settled, and the mp3, and the internet itself. What actually gets decided in a window like this one is smaller and far more personal. It's who walks out the other side knowing how to use the thing.
The kids coming up behind us don't have to make that call. It's just air to them. We do. And in 15 or 20 years the next one of these will land, probably faster than this one did, probably in something none of us have thought to worry about yet. When it does, the only thing that will count is what we did with the years we spent being disrupted.
I'd rather spend them building than mourning. Ask me again in five years whether I managed it.