Name: Y2K, iPhones, and AI: 25 Years of Tech Innovation and What Comes Next
Uploaded: 2025-12-22T02:16:04.791Z
Duration: 11 min 37 s
Description: In just 25 years technology has raced from Y2K fears to smartphones to the birth of artificial intelligence. Caroline Hyde charts the transformation while Sam Palmisano and Craig Moffett explain how breakthroughs from fiber networks to quantum computing and generative AI are reshaping business and daily life.

In just 25 years technology has raced from Y2K fears to smartphones to the birth of artificial intelligence. Caroline Hyde charts the transformation while Sam Palmisano and Craig Moffett explain how breakthroughs from fiber networks to quantum computing and generative AI are reshaping business and daily life.

Over the past 25 years, technology has transformed daily life with the advent of smartphones, streaming media, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Key milestones include the Y2K scare, the shift from wired to wireless devices, the rise of social media, and the launch of SpaceX and OpenAI's ChatGPT. 

Industry leaders highlight the unpredictable nature of technological progress, drawing parallels between the early internet era and today's AI advancements. The discussion also addresses the economic impacts of past telecom bubbles and the potential for quantum computing and AI to reshape industries, while noting the challenges society may face in adapting to rapid innovation.

Y2K, iPhones, and AI: 25 Years of Tech Innovation and What Comes Next

The last 25 years have brought us the smartphone streaming video and Elon Musk not to mention that A.I. and whatever it has in store. Our colleague Caroline Hyde guides us on our journey in tech. Why 2K the millennium bug the accident that never happened. We suddenly have this fear that as the celebration moved from 99 to 0 0 computer systems wouldn't work. But hundreds of millions of dollars were spent putting plans in place. There will be some Y2K glitches somewhere. We went from wired to wireless in many shapes and forms. The Mac the iPod and now the iPhone. We're able to be connected. We're able to be understanding indeed how to communicate. But also we could then interact with the Internet at the same time. 2007 streaming hits the big time with Netflix offering not just DVDs through the post but a streaming bundle too. We can improve our service offer the best of DVD and the best of online. Combine those and then it's a huge opportunity. We're seeing an evolution in social media that really dovetailed with the turning of the millennium. Facebook was born in a specific time and place a college campus the Web. Facebook made a significant pivot in 2021. I am proud to announce that starting today our company is now meta 3 2 1. Elon Musk who came in with SpaceX born in 2002 and so swiftly within six years he had already got a privately owned privately built spacecraft into orbit. People are now talking about putting data centers into space. A.I. A.I. A.I. A.I. A.I. A.I. Everyone now remembers the end of 2022 when just very quietly a not for profit open A.I. introduced Chachi P.T. and the crowd went wild. I think it takes like unique human arrogance to believe that I cannot supersede humans. And it's now that we're seeing IBM say by 2029 we will have in the hands of corporates a really useful quantum computer that will solve real world problems. For more on the evolution of technology over the first quarter of the 21st century I spoke to former IBM president and CEO Sam Palmisano and Moffitt Nathanson partner and senior analyst Craig Moffitt. Take us back to 2000. Yes. And how the world looked in 2000 and how differently it looks today in technology. Well it's incredible in 2000 at that point in time. I wasn't CEO yet. OK. And I was running the hardware business at IBM. And that was so a semiconductors that was storage mainframes PC and all those sorts of things. And basically the the dominant architecture for development for for research and development was the we called it the Wintel duopoly Windows plus Intel. They were the dominant for client server and client server had become the alternative to the mainframe because you could do a lot of the applications in the client server environment. You didn't have to run this big centralized computing environment. So that was what we that's the world we lived in. The Internet was just getting started. Actually the Internet started in the late 70s and people again didn't realize what was happening is because it was basically the research laboratories passing technical journals to each other in a standard format. That's how it began. But all the things that made it the Internet as it is today had to be built up. What do you see converging right now in tech. For example A.I. what it could make possible in various areas over the next 25 years. I don't think we have any idea but I can tell you some of the stuff we're working on. I don't think anyone has. It's just like the early days of the Internet. Did anybody think that this would get to where you can't live without your smartphone. I would. I was part of the industry. Nobody saw that. I mean we did see opportunities but I didn't. We never thought of Uber or GPS or those kinds of things operating on your phone. And that's I think what's going to happen here. There are people I know today that are building. They call up companies without any people. We're invested in when it's building an A.I. bank bank without people. I think in other areas which we've done a lot of work on like drug discovery you're just seeing the beginning of that. I think if you can take the very complex cases of disease or drugs and forget these big data centers connect that with a quantum computer with the knowledge within the A.I. systems and the data structures and the volume of that data and all those case histories and things that could be significant. That could be a significant breakthrough. When are we going to see quantum computers really be usable. And how transformational could they be where it's defined space that it's a it's not a general purpose computer. And I think that's where that when people are talking about it being ready by 2029 I believe that'll be the use cases at that point in time. It won't be what you can do in a cloud today or what you could run historically in the mainframe which is large general purpose systems to do all kinds of work manage all kinds of variables and those sorts of things will be very defined. Now the benefit of that is you'll have the general purpose systems feed the quantum machine. The quantum machine will do its stuff that it can do very very well and then pass it back. A lot of changes in a lot of places but certainly in the telecommunications area. Give us your perspective about that. Twenty five years. What did it look like in your 2000. It's quite interesting if you think back to that period for a number of reasons. One is it. People talk about it as the bursting of the dotcom bubble but the bursting of the dotcom bubble in reality wasn't terribly consequential. There wasn't a lot of market cap involved. There weren't all that many jobs involved. The bursting of the telecom bubble was much more significant and it set in motion things that have lasted and echoed for four twenty five years. I think you can make a case that the jobs lost and the potential for a really serious recession coming out of the bursting of the telecom bubble was why Alan Greenspan and the Fed cut rates aggressively to forestall a recession that ultimately inflated real estate prices and arguably was one of the main precipitants of the bursting of the housing bubble that created the Great Recession of 2010. On the other hand it created a tremendous amount of telecom capacity that continues to benefit us to this day. And the connectivity and the cost of connectivity that fell so precipitously because of the overbuilding of the late 1990s had really really salutary effects for the tech economy for another two decades. The obvious question that everybody's struggling with today is what are the echoes between that period and today's potential bubble in A.I. And if the bubble bursts the most important question is really will the capacity that's being built all these data centers for example but also the power that supports them in the facilities themselves. Will those facilities actually have a long useful life a long enough useful life to have a benefit even if the bubble bursts or are they such short lived assets that unfortunately it simply brings all the pain of the bursting of a bubble without any of the benefits. When we think about the so-called bubble in the year 2000 often people think of things like pets dot com. Yeah. But there was also fiber optic which got really overbuilt access capacity. But without that fiber optic cable would we have many of the services we have. No you're exactly right. It's it really turned out to be tremendously beneficial to the tech economy. There was a genuine capacity shortage going into the late 1990s. And what happened was Wall Street in the way that it does figured the way to solve this problem is to fund new companies and new innovation new new entrants created this extraordinary overhang of capacity. So there was this massive excess capacity. The marginal costs of any telecom business are essentially zero. And so it didn't take a genius to figure out the debt service from all these new entrants was going to be impossible to satisfy. You were going to have a wave of bankruptcies that would create this this enormous crash. We never would have had Netflix without the enormous capacity that had been created in the telecom bubble. And and Netflix was able to take advantage of essentially free transport to build a business that today is sort of dominant in the entertainment business. And streaming is all the rage right now given even some of the deals we're seeing going on or trying to go on. I remember back in the day going from twisted pair to coaxial cable seemed like a really big step forward. Coaxial cable as you said really took off as the transmission medium to the home that lasted for another really two decades. And it's only been in the last five years that you've seen real pressure on that because. And by the way I would argue we're all we're back in a telecom fiber bubble this time in FTTH as it's called a fiber to the home over building by not just AT&T and Frontier and Verizon and and the big companies but by a host of privately funded private equity companies are building in markets where the density simply isn't high enough anymore to support the returns. And it looks to us like you're going to have yet another bubble bursting not anywhere near the size of 1999. But we suspect that bubble will burst. Looking back you know what we thought we saw in technology in 2000. Twenty twenty five looking out what do you see. A.I. is by far the most important and dramatic technology innovation of our lifetimes. It's not even close. And we're we're really struggling to figure out what it's going to do to societies. You know that I hear people say well of course the industrial revolution was tremendously beneficial to human productivity and humankind. But we had 200 years to adjust to the industrial revolution to figure out what are the right things to teach in colleges or schools of at the time and for society to adjust. This is a revolution that's happening in a decade. We've never seen anything like that. And I think the next 10 years are therefore the hardest to predict of anything I've ever seen in my lifetime is just how is society going to respond to what is certainly the case that huge numbers of jobs are going to be replaceable by A.I. to try to figure out how will society try to adjust to something this profound that comes this quickly. It is it is an incredibly difficult question or set of questions to answer.

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