AI will fail.
And everyone agrees.
2008 “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix.” — Jim Keyes, CEO of Blockbuster, on streaming.
Netflix passed 300 million subscribers by 2024. Blockbuster has one store left.
2008 “It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?” — Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, on cloud computing.
The cloud became a ~$700-billion-a-year market. Oracle now sells it, about $34 billion a year of cloud computing.
2007 “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” — Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, on the iPhone.
Apple has sold over 2.3 billion iPhones. The most profitable product in history.
2001 “Linux is a cancer.” — Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, on open-source software.
By 2015 Linux ran the entire internet, every supercomputer, and every Android phone. And Microsoft itself joined the Linux Foundation.
1998 — “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” — Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize economist, on the internet.
Today ~5.5 billion people are online, on the internet.
1995 — “The Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” — Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, on the internet.
Not really.
1995 — “How come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?” — Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, on e-commerce.
U.S. online retail blew past $1 trillion a year. Not every mall survived, for better or worse.
1982 — “The VCR is to the American film producer as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” — Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, on home video.
Within a few years, home video earned Hollywood more than the box office did.
1981 — “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” — attributed to Bill Gates, on computer memory.
The phone in your pocket carries tens of thousands of times more.
1977 — “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” — Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, on the personal computer.
There are now roughly 2 billion personal computers in use. DEC no longer exists.
1962 — “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein.” — Dick Rowe, Decca Records, on the Beatles.
They became the best-selling band in history, with over 600 million records sold.
1959 — The Xerox copier “has no future in the office-copying market.” — Arthur D. Little, report for IBM, on photocopying.
The Xerox 914 became one of the best-selling industrial products ever made. It’s also a verb, like “to Google something”.
1955 — “It will be gone by June.” — Variety, on rock ‘n’ roll.
It ruled popular music for the next half-century.
1948 — “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” — Mary Somerville, BBC broadcasting pioneer, on television.
By 1960, nine in ten American homes had one.
1946 — “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, on television.
It became the dominant medium of the entire 20th century.
1943 — “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, on computers.
There are now billions, plus a few trillion more chips running everything else.
1941 — Penicillin “does not appear to have been considered as possibly useful from any other point of view.” — The British Medical Journal, on antibiotics.
Penicillin has since saved an estimated 200 million lives.
1933 — “Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” — Ernest Rutherford, Nobel laureate, on nuclear power.
It now supplies ~10% of the world’s electricity.
1925 — “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” — Harry Warner, Warner Bros., on talking pictures.
Silent film was effectively extinct by 1930.
1921 — “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” — associates of David Sarnoff, on radio.
By 1935, six in ten American homes had a radio.
1920 — Robert Goddard “only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” — The New York Times, on rockets.
In 1969, as Apollo 11 flew to the Moon, the Times printed a retraction.
1916 — “The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous.” — an aide to Field Marshal Haig, on tanks.
Armored divisions decided the next world war.
1911 — “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” — Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on military aircraft.
Air power decided WWII too. And Foch commanded the side that nearly lost without it. It’s expensive to not be right.
1903 — A flying machine might take “from one million to ten million years” to develop. — The New York Times, on the airplane.
The Wright brothers flew 69 days later.
1903 — “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank, on the automobile.
By 1929, most American families owned a car. ~1.5 billion now roll worldwide.
1901 — “My imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.” — H. G. Wells, on the submarine.
Submarines became decisive weapons in both world wars within 15 years.
1899 — “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” — attributed to the U.S. Patent Office, on invention itself.
The 20th century out-invented all of prior human history combined.
1898 — “Vaccination a delusion; its penal enforcement a crime.” — Alfred Russel Wallace, on vaccines.
Smallpox — humanity’s deadliest disease — was declared eradicated in 1980.
1897 — “Radio has no future.” — Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, on radio.
Within 40 years it was in nearly every home on Earth.
1896 — “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” — Lord Kelvin, on X-rays.
They were saving lives in hospitals within months.
1895 — “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, on flight.
Roughly 4 billion people now fly every year.
1886 — “Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months.” — Thomas Edison, on alternating current.
AC became the electrical standard of the entire planet by the 1890s.
1880s — “The phonograph is not of any commercial value.” — Thomas Edison, on recorded music.
Recorded music is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. Edison later called it his favorite invention.
1880 — Edison’s electric light is “a conspicuous failure.” — Henry Morton, President of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on the light bulb.
It lit nearly every home in the developed world within 50 years.
1878 — “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, British Post Office, on the telephone.
There are now more phone subscriptions than there are people on Earth.
1878 — “When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.” — Sir Erasmus Wilson, Oxford, on electric light.
Near-universal in American cities by 1940.
1876 — “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — Western Union internal memo, on Bell.
Bell’s company became one of the largest corporations in history.
1873 — “The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.” — Sir John Eric Erichsen, surgeon to Queen Victoria, on surgery.
Surgeons now operate routinely on all three. Like roughly 500,000 per day.
1872 — “Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” — Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology, on germ theory .
Germ theory became the foundation of all modern medicine within 20 years.
1864 — “No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free.” — King William I of Prussia, on railways.
Rail became the backbone of the industrial economy within a generation.
1854 — “Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” — Henry David Thoreau, on the telegraph.
A cable joined America to Europe just 12 years later.
1839 — “To try to capture fleeting mirror images is not just an impossible undertaking… the very wish to do such a thing is blasphemous.” — Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, on photography.
Humanity now takes nearly 2 trillion photographs a year.
1835 — “Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic.” — Dr. Dionysius Lardner, on steamships.
A steamship crossed the Atlantic in 1838. Three years later.
1830 — “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” — Dr. Dionysius Lardner, on railways.
Within 20 years the rails spanned entire nations.
370 BCE — “[…] it will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” — Socrates, on writing.
It sounds ridiculous. Especially since Socrates was most likely one of the smartest men alive at his time. How come he could have imagined writing was so bad?
Writing became the foundation of every civilization that followed.
We only know he said it… because someone wrote it down.
Why AI Will Fail.
So here we are again.
The internet, the smartphone, social media — all led to today’s AI.
But AI isn’t so good. AI Will Fail:
2023 — “So much money and attention concentrated on so little a thing… something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind.” — Noam Chomsky, The New York Times, on ChatGPT.
2023 — “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.” — Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, on ChatGPT.
2024 — “What trillion-dollar problem will AI solve? AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, it must solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.” — Jim Covello, Head of Global Equity Research, Goldman Sachs.
2024 — The productivity gains from AI are “likely to be minimal.” — Daron Acemoglu, MIT economist.
2024 — “Generative AI: too much spend, too little benefit?” — Goldman Sachs, report title.
So yes.
AI hallucinates.
It forgets sources.
It invents court cases.
It gives people six fingers.
It makes videos where physics is wrong.
It writes like a genius one minute and like a kid the next.
And yet.
People are still using it to write code, explain contracts, design images, edit videos, summarize meetings, answer customers, tutor kids, translate manuals, draft ads, build apps, and replace the first blank page of almost every creative process.
AI is still terrible.
So was the first call.
So was the buffering wheel.
So was the frozen computer.
So was the ugly first website.
So was the blurry first camera phone.
The early version of the future is usually embarrassing.
Then it becomes the present.
History doesn’t repeat itself. But the people betting against it do.
Do you?
PS: You don’t want your company to be left behind.
Reading about AI is useful.
But it won’t change how your company works.
If you have 50+ people on your team, adopting AI is not a “send them a newsletter” problem. It is a systems problem.
Your people have different roles, clients, tools, workflows, permissions, data, risks, and habits. My newsletter, sent to 750,000 people, can’t do that.
That is what I help companies fix.
I run tailored AI workshops for enterprise teams. We map where AI can actually save time, where it should not be used, and how your people can adopt it without creating chaos.
If your company has 50+ people, message me.
I offer a free discovery call to my subscribers.
Humanly yours, Ruben Hassid.
PPS: I’m hiring a Growth lead.
‘How to AI’ is one of the fastest-growing newsletters in the world, currently at 750k+ subscribers and growing by thousands of new readers per day.
I’m looking for an exceptional Growth person to help scale this even further.
This is not a slow corporate role. We move fast, work hard, test aggressively, and care deeply about quality. You’ll work closely with me on the growth engine behind the newsletter.
If you’re obsessed with growth, unusually sharp with paid acquisition, and excited to help build a media company at serious scale, with the intent to help millions of people figure out AI→ I want to hear from you.
So we are, without fail, the first critics of everything that eventually changes our lives.
CEOs, Nobel laureates, presidents, and even Socrates at some point called the next big thing useless, dangerous, or a fad. But they all became its biggest users, maybe even paying for it! AI is indeed no different.
Such a great point. Love all the examples. I’m laughing an 8 week cohort to teach coaches how to use AI to support their business to create time and capacity for more of the human connections we crave and I’ll share some of these. Thank you!