alt Hacker NewsI'm sure we can find stories from the 1980s and 1990s about how the "world wide web" hasn't increased the GDP at all.
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I assume you mean technology, not the www (didn't exist). And, until around the second half of the 90s those papers were right. Most papers you'll find arguing that it wasn't contributing much to productivity were saying just that, that it wasn't, not that it won't. At the time, they were right. Productivity had stagnated despite heavy spending in technology.
But now we have something else happening. It's hard to find an application for something that makes a lot of mistakes. That's not the same issue. The issue then was that no one had written the software yet. Everyone knew what software needed writing. The future was obvious. Here, not so much. We can't see how to make it not make mistakes.
We have to hope someone will come up with a solution to that. Otherwise their big bets on something non-productive won't pan out the same way that the computer did, and we're all going to suffer for it.
Given that the first communication between a web server and client was in December 1990 (and that was private to Tim B-L's environment), and it was released to the public in 1991, I bet we actually couldn't find such stories in the 1980s :)