AI Hype vs. Reality: Lessons from PCs, the Internet, and Smartphones

As a professional whose career started in the 1980s, AI feels like the early days of PCs, the Internet, and smartphones—big hype, real potential, but real transformation takes time. Even if the tech moves fast, humans and systems take longer to adapt.

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[FYI: The above text was generated by ChatGPT except that I added the 1st clause: "As a professional whose career started in the 1980s".

(I left in the em dash (—) so you might have picked up that this was generated by AI.)

I include my initial long paragraph explanation I prompted to ChatGPT below, so you can see how it captured my main thoughts in a few sentences, saving me (and you) time.

This prompt was part of a much longer chat conversation where ChatGPT provided me different ideas for the graphic, which I eventually sent to our graphic designer to make the attached graphic. However, that longer context likely helped it with its response, in addition to my prompt below.]

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My ChatGPT prompt to generate the above:

"For my post with the 4 quadrant graphic, here's my draft text, can you make it even more "punchy" and tight for an LI post?

As my small companies try to use AI to help us be more efficient and effective, I am very much reminded of the early days of PCs, the Internet, and smart phones. I think all of those had an initial overhyped stage, but their potential was real. However, it took years of technology improvement and especially humans learning to use and adapt to the new technologies, before they transformed society. For AI, even if the technology evolves at a much more rapid pace, there is still the limitations of humans and society being able to learn to use the tools and to integrate them into other systems. What do you think? Are you a believer in AIs potential? Do you think it will transform society and cause some types of professionals to go extinct quickly?"

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8/21/25 Published (EJV)