How the Internet Rewired Work—and What That Tells Us About AI’s Likely Impact

Remember when America Online CDs carpeted America and “You’ve got mail” felt like the future? The internet did transform work—but not the way 1998 thought. The surprises weren’t just CEOs in hoodies and legions of coders. They were barbers with booking links, nurses on telehealth, and delivery jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

Looking back at that time isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. What we imagined then, and how the internet actually changed jobs—sometimes loudly, often quietly—suggests a lot about today’s artificial-intelligence moment.