[SgtBastard]

… the internet was not immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person.

Even if you skip ARPAnet, you’re forgetting the Gopher days and even if you jump straight to WWW+email==the internet, you’re forgetting the mosaic days.

The applications that became useful to the masses emerged a decade+ after the public internet and even then, it took 2+ decades to reach anything approaching saturation.

Your dismissal is not likely to age well, for similar reasons.

[chii]

the "usefulness" excuse is irrelevant, and the claim that phones/internet is "immediately useful" is just a post hoc rationalization. It's basically trying to find a reasonable reason why opposition to AI is valid, and is not in self-interest.

The opposition to AI is from people who feel threatened by it, because it either threatens their livelihood (or family/friends'), and that they feel they are unable to benefit from AI in the same way as they had internet/mobile phones.

[duchef]

The usefulness of mobile phones was identifiable immediately and it is absolutely not 'post hoc rationalization'. The issue was the cost - once low cost mobile telephones were produced they almost immediately became ubiquitous (see nokia share price from the release of the nokia 6110 onwards for example).

This barrier does not exist for current AI technologies which are being given away free. Minor thought experiment - just how radical would the uptake of mobile phones have been if they were given away free?

[qualifck]

Eh, quite the contrary. A lot of anti AI people genuinely wanted to use AI but run into the factual reality of the limitations of the software. It's not that it's going to take my job, it's that I was told it would redefine how I do work and is exponentially improving only to find out that it just kind of sucks and hasn't gotten much better this year.