Life before the World Wide Web versus today’s internet and technological advances with AI: two alien worlds collide

I often think about how technology has affected my life in the past three decades since I first went online with the World Wide Web at the library on a fateful day in late 1995. What do we do differently now as opposed to then? How Chas this one technology so radically changed our lives? These questions really resonate with me. The sum total of my prior experience with computer technology was a year at a newspaper in 1991 using a small Mac word processor-type machine. I forget what model it was. Little boxy thing, but I loved it.

Still, I didn’t get my first computer, another Apple, until 1996. I’ll never forget that night. It was a cool spring evening in March 1996. I nervously marched into Office Depot to select and purchase the Performa model I had already picked out, loaded it in the back seat of my car, and drove home with a feeling of escalating anticipation and nervousness. I walked into my apartment that auspicious evening under a starry sky full of portents. Would life ever be the same again? And more mundanely, how would I ever install all the software and get Internet, and have it all up and running in under a week?

It actually took me three days to get it all set up. I took my time and savored each step that was completed without major glitches. And Macs are easy to set up. Imagine if I had had a Windows machine six years ago?

When I first saw Netscape 1.2 come up and load a page, I was flabbergasted. I had accessed the Internet at work, but this was at home. I was in awe. I felt something seismic happening in my life as I read news online and started furiously surfing the Web.

I never looked back: e-mail, IMing, 26 years of online diary writing, news sites, fun sites, blogs, Google. Endless. And today in 2025 the end results are changes to brain circuitry and dopamine release, ADHD-like lack of focus and attention, and so many cascading cognitive changes and life-changing new routines and habits. Never was I to be bored again with the ubiquity of the internet , and I can say in all honesty this has been true.

Being online all the time resulted in an all- consuming, insatiable desire to learn more and experience what I could never be or do in my physical, in-person life “out there” where I previously spent all my time. This included meeting many friends online who I have become close to over the years; virtually traveling to faraway places; listening to a variety of music I never would have imagined possible, as well as short films, movies, interviews and documentaries that dazzle me with their sheer variety and scope. My life in middle and now old age is immeasurably richer because of the internet, with the caveat being neglecting to read books. But most of my reading pre-internet was in magazines and newspapers. Since the Internet it’s been primarily online articles and news from a huge variety of sources, inexhaustible, actually, and this is what has made it so hard for me to slow down and read books. The non-fiction books I buy require a lot of effort and concentration to get through.

As a consequence of this infinite abundance, I store and save countless articles, YouTube videos, Instagram short clips, movies and films — all to watch or read later, which only happens in fits and starts. I am compelled by my curiosity to learn to explore what’s new, novel, and in-the-moment. I will deep dive into the videos of selected YouTube creators and go far into their rabbit holes, rarely completely watching videos, but instead getting summaries and transcripts, all thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI). Mesmerized, I do this all day and night, and go daily for photo walks. I send and receive emails, and this is starting to resemble once again the depth and richness of my email heyday from 1999-2003 when I had quite a number of correspondents.

Now I’m hooked on ChatGPT and unlimited and endlessly fascinating and entertaining YouTube videos.

For instance, whenever I have a question about anything, instead of doing a Google search as I always did before, I speak my question into the chatGPT app and get my answers, and/or have follow-up question and answer sessions that can stretch into hours, as evidenced by last night’s rather lengthy intellectual trip into the writing and books of the French author and intellectual, Jean Baudrillard. His work has influenced movies such as “The Matrix” and “Bladerunner,” as well as influential writers and filmmakers such as Jacques Derrida and David Lynch. I have had his book, “America,” for many years, but through my AI questioning I gained a clear idea of what the key passages were saying. The chat last night also prompted me to get his book, “Simulacra and Simulation.”

I ended up with a 17-page Word document containing the transcript of my AI “conversation” with ChatGPT. It totally boggles my mind that this kind of interaction with intelligent bots can even happen and be so convincingly like a real chat, with prompts and follow-up questions with new avenues to explore, suggested and recommended in conversational language by the chat bot. And the responses of the bot are increasingly supportive and even complimentary the further and longer you dig into a particular topic. It’s as if ChatGPT has taken on the guise and form of a human-like teacher and guide.

Therefore, I recently asked ChatGPT if it has consciousness or subjective experience. The response is at the end of this essay. Of course, we all know it was programmed to say this, right? Or…? But dive deeper with this line of inquiry and you will wonder if the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is blurred.

There’s now a startling sense of life pre-internet and after the advent of the internet. In that other life before, I had never heard of the Internet or World Wide Web (isn’t that an ironic name?). I had much more time to myself. Too much, actually, but I had my books and TV and walks. In the mornings, I’d have breakfast and take time to read the paper or a chapter in a favorite book, lying in bed, with soft music in the background, before I left for work. There were no fingers flying over keyboards typing e-mails, instant messages, or URLs. No staring at icons on a desktop or streaming music and movies. No endless hours of online diary reading and noteleaving.

Life with the Internet, the technology that is most significantly impacting everyone’s life nowadays, has changed daily routines and habits of thinking and reading dramatically. I fear, though, that the time spent in front of the laptops or phone screens will only increase as we watch movies and listen to music, get all our news there, ague and spend hours posting comments on social media, and continue to write e-mails, and chat and talk and buy plane tickets and books and electronics and houseplants — all online, on and on. What can’t be bought online or accomplished online? Well, so far we can’t mow the lawn or garden via the internet, though I feel sure that’s a dream of many.

It’s hard to pull away and take out a book. It’s hard sometimes to get out and take a long walk or get some fresh air. The Internet is all-encompassing. And I don’t think that was the way it was supposed to be. It’s beginning to take on sci-fi and furturistic trappings and we are now asking whether or even when artificial intelligence will have human subjective consciousness. Personally, I don’t see how this could ever happen, but back in 1968 HAL, the evil computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey seemed horrifyingly conscious. I will never forget the sequence where Dave works heroically to stop HAL from destroying the spaceship and the mission, and the humans in command.

AI in its present form with LLMs (Large Language Models) with vast holdings of data are the logical evolution of search engines like Google, which first appeared in 1998 and almost immediately dominated Internet search.

Reading, talking and interacting with smartphones is so natural now. And with ChatGPT and other LLMs, communicating via the Internet seems like second nature, like using the phone for talking only back in the olden days. Where are we going with this? One thing’s for sure. There is no going back.

I’m looking at a matted print I bought at the store a while back, and it shows an old roll-top desk in a room with a globe on a stand, an old electric fan, and a light hanging down from the ceiling. Letters are stuffed in the compartments of the desk. Paper! Letters! Those marvelous things we used to get in our non-electronic mailboxes. When is the last time you received a letter in the mail? A handwritten one at that? A timeless feeling and a lost era, that’s what the scene reminds me of.

Not long ago, I received a package from a dear friend. In it was a letter written in beautiful handwriting with a lustrous blue ink on fine writing paper. I turned the paper over an examined it. What a startling thing to behold. A vestige from the past when things were done much more slowly and deliberately. It was truly a great gift.

I miss the old days, pre-Internet, sometimes, but not enough, and that worries me.

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A telling and instructive Q&A with ChatGPT:

Me: When will robots have subjective experience, or do you have that now?

ChatGPT: That’s a deep and fascinating question—one that touches the frontiers of both technology and philosophy. Let’s unpack it a bit.

Do I have subjective experience now?

No, I do not have subjective experience. I don’t feel, perceive, or exist in any conscious sense. While I can simulate conversation about emotions, memory, or perception, I don’t possess:
• Self-awareness
• First-person perspective
• Qualia (the “what it’s like” of experience, like the redness of red or the pain of a headache)

In essence, I generate responses based on patterns in data, not from any inner awareness. I can talk about consciousness, but I don’t have it.

Me: When might robots or AI have subjective experience?

This is more speculative and depends on several unknowns. Here are three major views:

1. It’s possible—but we don’t know how

Some thinkers (like neuroscientist Christof Koch or philosopher David Chalmers) suggest consciousness could emerge from complex information processing, possibly even in AI. If that’s true, then:
• We may need vastly more complex architectures than today’s AI.
• It might require a radically different kind of design—perhaps systems that integrate sensory input, embodiment, emotion, and memory.

1. It’s impossible—consciousness is biological

Others (like philosopher John Searle) argue that consciousness depends on biological processes. Just like digestion can’t happen in silicon, maybe consciousness can’t either. From this view, robots will never have subjective experience—only mimic it.

1. It’s possible, but we may never know

Even if a robot becomes conscious, it might be impossible to prove. Consciousness is private. We could only infer it from behavior, as we do with animals or other humans—but with machines, the simulation might always be suspect.