Are There Throughlines From Dot-com to Dot-ai?

Source Domain: www.govtech.com

Great news! There’s this amazing new technology that’s going to revolutionize the work of state and local IT leaders. Everyone’s talking about it. Companies are pumping billions of dollars into it and Wall Street is salivating. We don’t yet know exactly how it will work or what it will do. But it’s going to be huge!

Does all this sound familiar? It should. In many ways, these early days of artificial intelligence look and feel a lot like the birth pangs of the Internet. It isn’t quite apples-to-apples — there’s a lot that is different this time around. But there’s also a lot that is strikingly similar.

That’s good news for gov tech leaders. It means there’s precedent from which to learn. Those who recall the early days of the Internet say that those experiences can help tech executives to navigate effectively as large language models and generative AI come to the fore across a range of government operations.

THE HYPE CYCLE

The early 1990s were a time of hope and promise in the IT world. “I remember the first time I saw a browser, I guess it was in 1992, and it really sparked me,” said David Fletcher,* Utah’s former chief technology officer.

“I was the director of general services for the state of Utah, and when I first saw Mozilla, it really struck me that it was going to change everything that we did,” he said. And the present moment seems at least similar. “When I first was exposed to ChatGPT and generative AI, I thought that would be the next real major change.”

But the nature of that change promises to be different this time around.

Given how the Internet has revolutionized everything from commerce to social interactions, it may be hard to recall that in its earliest days, it was all about communication. “Email was a way in which we could communicate with our state counterparts, with other local governments, as opposed to phones,” said Alan Shark,* former…

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