The bubble feels different this time

Last week at dinner, someone told me they had tried ChatGPT once. It made something up, so they closed it and never came back. I smiled and said nothing. Not because they were wrong. Because I had no idea where to start.

I have been in tech for twenty years. I have watched the bubbles come and go: web 2.0, social media, crypto, the metaverse. Same movie every time. Insiders evangelizing, outsiders rolling their eyes, both staring at the same horizon and arguing about what will happen.

This one feels different, and it took me a while to name why. We are no longer arguing about the future. We are living in different years.

In my year, AI is a colleague. It keeps my books, answers my mail, builds my software. I ship in an afternoon what used to take a team a month. In their year, AI is a free chatbot that writes birthday poems, curry recipes and occasionally emails. Here is the strange part. Nobody in this conversation is wrong. We are both accurately describing the year we live in. The years just aren't the same.

And the gap compounds. Every release I absorb and they don't moves us further apart. Some weeks a dinner conversation feels like a postcard from a country I no longer live in.

I will be honest about the feeling: it's detachment, and it is not pleasant. The tempting move is to dress it up as being ahead. Superior, even. That is the trap. The bubble being early does not make it right, and the people outside it being late does not make them wrong. They are not behind because they are slow. They are behind because nothing in their life has demanded this yet.

Demand is coming for all of them. For some, it will arrive through their employer, and it will not ask first.

So what do you do with a head start? Not much, if you spend it enjoying the view. A head start is only worth something to the people you hand it to. Every transformation I have ever been part of came down to exactly this: someone standing between two years, holding both, translating.

I no longer try to win the dinner conversation.

The future doesn't need more preachers. It needs translators.