Revised: 9/28/25
The computing technology industry has sent wave after wave of change cascading over business beginning with mid-twentieth century mainframes. All of society was affected when personal computers appeared in the nineteen-eighties. In the last decade, the computer network (the Internet), cloud, and blockchain computing all changed both business and society. The current wave brings Large Language Models (LLMs), Chatbots, and AI.
Cutting back the underbrush
LLMs are now soaring high on the hype curve for several reasons.
Technology analysts—like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC— track new technologies through the “hype cycle.” These analysts are paid by tech companies and companies that consume tech to publicize technical trends, which are typically oversold by ambitious companies eager for the media limelight and product sales that come with the publicity.
Five years ago, the tech industry got an unexpected boost from the pandemic when the Covid lock downs forced school children, businesses, churches, social clubs, and government agencies– almost everyone– online. Network traffic watchers estimated that computer activity saw ten years of projected growth in three months.
However, as the pandemic ebbed, sales of new hardware, software, and tech services declined. The public was relieved to have fewer Zoom calls, but the tech industry starved for “the next big thing to revolutionize the world as we know it.”
The pandemic was a godsend to the tech industry because it temporarily warded off a slump that has been drifting downward steadily for over a decade. Today, people use their personal computer, which is now most likely a slim laptop or smartphone, for email, browsing the web and social media, word processing, and spread sheets. This functionality hasn’t changed for over ten years. Old laptops work fine. Between Windows 7 and 12, Microsoft has repainted, redecorated, and polished up the old system, but what’s new?
The wide success of Chromebooks, thrifty low-powered computers running applications on the cloud instead of a local machine, shows that the personal computer market is getting stale. Some life may be left in video game and audio innovation, but those opportunities are for story-tellers and artists, not computer engineers.
Computer applications and services for specialized professionals in fields like medicine, engineering, or scientific research have continued to improve and expand, but mass market technology used by everyone is stranded on a plateau.
To fund Silicon Valley billionaires beyond the mid-twenty-twenties, something amazing must make the scene.
Hype cycles occur for all tech. LLMs are not special in this but the intensity of the hype surrounding LLMs is an exceptionally thick and it makes evaluating LLMs difficult.
LLMs
I hesitate to say this because it sounds like I have been taken in by the hype, but I suspect LLMs may be an exceptionally important technical innovation, approaching writing, printing presses, radio and television, and computer networks in significance. Each of these technologies changed relationships among us and our environment. And each has inspired trepidation, confusion surrounding massive change.
My own trepidation—see my previous blog which whines about LLMs ruining Google search—is a clue to their power. Hype skepticism is normal, trepidation is more significant.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, the Egyptian god Theuth praised his invention writing but Plato quoted Thamus, king of Egypt: “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Perhaps true, but writing still blossomed.
Many say the Reformation began when followers started reading printed scripture. In our lifetimes, we have watched broadcasting and the computer network change the world.
Transformations
Today, I see the threshold of a new transformation based on LLMs. Looking back from today, previous transformations are easy to understand. Writing depicts thought with a physical pens and paper. Printing quickly generates swarms of documents. Broadcasting instantaneously projects voices and images to crowds separated by long distances. On the computer network, everyone broadcasts like a television station.
Human hands write. Machines print. Electronic devices transmit and receive. Computer networks send and receive packets of encoded information to and from addresses. LLMs survey oceans of data in response to questions, putting an army of not-too-bright researchers at a single person’s beck and call.
LLMs’ armies are not very bright because they are reporters, not creators. ChatGPT literally does not know what it is talking about, but it can summarize the contents of its vast store of information quickly with surprising accuracy, although it cannot judge the truth of its extracts and sometimes makes egregious mistakes, called hallucinations, like suggesting glue as a pizza topping. An LLM is like an English major reporting on Einstein. They may get facts straight but wildly miss on predictions from Einstein’s theories because they have no basis for understanding Einstein.
Does that invalidate journalism and reporting? No. But it explains why careful readers always check reporter’s credentials, who they are, who they represent, and what they are likely to know. Only with that background can we choose what use we can make of their reporting.
When the printing press was invented, Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg collaborated. Luther translated the most important book in his life, the bible, into the common language. Gutenberg printed Luther’s translation and the Christian church was changed forever. In the process, the role of copyists in monasteries dwindled, but theologians flourished.
Futures
Will there be a Luther and Gutenberg for LLMs? No one can be sure, but the possibility is real. Will the LLM “killer app” wreck our lives?
Spreadsheets, the personal computer killer app did not destroy the accounting profession, but word processors ended typing pools. I lived through the disappearance of typing pools. Some typists may have missed long days pounding on a keyboard, but many went on to more interesting and challenging jobs. The same will happen when the Luther and Gutenberg for LLMs appears.
The future is unpredictable, but I can say this with certainty: if LLMs are as important as I suspect they are, a Luther and Gutenberg use of LLMs will appear. I can’t say when, and I know even less about what form its appearance will take or what changes it will engender, but it will come.
We may not recognize LLMs’ Luther and Gutenberg until decades after it comes, but if nothing comes, LLMs are not what I think they are.
