When a fundamentally new technology comes into existence, describing it using existing technologies doesn’t always work.
In 1995, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates appeared on “Late Show with David Letterman” to discuss what was then considered the next big thing: the internet. What followed was a fascinating exchange that perfectly captured the challenge of explaining revolutionary technology to someone anchored in familiar paradigms. Letterman’s skeptical questioning and Gates’ patient explanations offer a time capsule of how transformative technologies are initially received—and misunderstood—by the mainstream.
The conversation began with Letterman’s characteristic directness: “What about this internet thing? Do you know anything about that?”
“Sure,” Gates replied confidently.
“What the hell is that exactly?” Letterman pressed.
Gates attempted to paint a picture of this emerging digital landscape: “Well, it’s become a place where people are publishing information, right? So everybody can have their own homepage. Companies are there with the latest information. It’s wild what’s going on. You can send electronic mail to people. It is the big new thing.”
Letterman, ever the skeptic, was quick to acknowledge his limitations: “But it’s easy to criticize something you don’t fully understand, which is my position here.”
“Go ahead,” Gates encouraged, perhaps sensing what was coming.
What followed was a perfect example of how new technologies are often viewed through the lens of existing ones. Letterman recalled a recent announcement: “I can remember a couple of months ago, there was a big breakthrough announcement that on the internet or on some computer deal, they were going to broadcast a baseball game. You could listen to a baseball game on your computer, and I just thought to myself: Does radio ring a bell?”
Gates acknowledged the comparison but tried to highlight the crucial difference: “There is a difference. It’s not a huge difference.”
“What is the difference?” Letterman asked.
“You can listen to the baseball game whenever you want,” Gates explained, introducing the concept of on-demand content.
But Letterman wasn’t finished. “Right. Oh, I see. So it’s stored in one of your memory deals and you could come back to it a year later. Do tape recorders ring a bell?” The audience erupted, and Gates burst out laughing at Letterman’s perfectly timed rebuttal.
This exchange reveals something profound about how society processes technological revolution. Letterman wasn’t being obtuse—he was doing what most people do when confronted with something genuinely new: trying to understand it through familiar reference points. Radio and tape recorders were technologies he understood, so naturally, he filtered this “internet thing” through those existing frameworks.
What Letterman couldn’t grasp in that moment was that the internet represented not just an improvement on existing technologies, but an entirely new paradigm. It wasn’t just about listening to baseball games on demand—it was about democratizing information publishing, creating global connectivity, and fundamentally changing how humans communicate and access knowledge. The internet would eventually transform commerce, entertainment, education, and virtually every aspect of modern life in ways that neither radio nor tape recorders ever could.
Today, we find ourselves in a remarkably similar position with artificial intelligence. Just as Letterman compared the internet to radio and tape recorders in 1995, many in 2025 are trying to understand AI through the lens of existing technologies—seeing it as a better search engine, an advanced calculator, or a sophisticated autocomplete. But like the internet before it, AI represents a paradigm shift that transcends simple comparisons to previous innovations. Understanding AI’s true potential requires the same leap of imagination that understanding the internet demanded thirty years ago, moving beyond familiar analogies to embrace genuinely transformative possibilities.