If you are over 30, brace yourself. Things have changed again
Hey, I was born in the early 90s, and sometimes I think the year 2000 was probably peak humanity. We just did not realize it while living through it. Things have changed incredibly fast since then. First came the internet, then smartphones, and now AI feels like the next huge turning point.
People born in the 80s and 90s might be the last generation that remembers growing up before technology became deeply embedded in everyday life. We experienced the old world for a while before the internet arrived.
When the internet became popular in the late 90s, it felt completely different. MSN, AIM, ICQ, IRC, MySpace, early forums, video games that actually shipped as complete products. The internet felt like something you visited rather than something that followed you everywhere.
Then smartphones arrived and everything accelerated. Technology changed so quickly that nobody really had time to adapt. We simply accepted it because modern life started requiring it.
The late 90s and early 2000s probably had the best balance. We had enough technology to make life easier, but not enough to consume every part of it.
Fast forward twenty years and look where we are. Our data is constantly collected, our purchases are tracked, our locations can be monitored, and advertising follows us everywhere. People interact face to face less, online arguments are everywhere, and trust in institutions and media seems lower than ever.
Then AI arrived.
At first it was fascinating. I use AI every day myself. Then image generation became impressive, followed by video generation. We laughed at obviously fake AI images online, but the technology kept improving much faster than most people expected.
I have used AI tools since 2022, and I used to think I was pretty good at spotting AI generated content. Now I get fooled sometimes. With something like VEO 3, I genuinely do not know how confident I can be when looking at a realistic video.
That is the part that worries me.
The technology today is probably the worst version of what we will eventually have, and even the current version is already incredibly capable. AI has gone from being an interesting tool to something many people rely on every day in only a few years.
So where does that leave us in 2029?
If realistic AI images and videos are already difficult to distinguish from reality, what happens when they become almost impossible to identify? And I am talking about people who actually understand AI. What happens to everyone else?
Maybe I am overthinking it, but I do not think this transition is going to slow down.
The internet had its period where everything still felt new and mostly human. Smartphones changed that completely. I think AI is going through a similar phase right now.
So I am trying to appreciate the current moment while it lasts. Most of what we see is still created by real people. Most videos are still real. Human creativity still dominates most spaces.
That might not remain true forever.
I missed a lot of the early internet years because I was too young to understand how special that period was. I do not want to make the same mistake again. I want to actually enjoy this period while things are still changing, before we enter another version of the world that we have to learn all over again.
TL;DR: AI is changing society at a speed similar to the internet and smartphones. The next major step may make it extremely difficult to know what is real and what is generated. As someone who grew up in the 90s, I am trying to appreciate this last period where most of what we see is still clearly human.