How do I decide what to use AI for — and what the history of the internet teaches us about it

AI is like a Swiss army knife: good at everything to some degree, focused on nothing. That makes it hard to derive a use case from — and it isn’t a new situation.

The nineties imagined the internet as a library and a parliament. We built a mall and a stadium. I walk through two timelines — what we imagined, and what actually got built — then draw the same diagram for AI. The two shapes are strikingly similar, and that similarity tells us something about what’s coming.

On top of that conclusion sits a method: one that shows which blade of the AI Swiss army knife to focus on for your own product.