WSJ vai MSN: “Remember when America Online CDs carpeted America and “You’ve got mail” felt like the future? The internet did transform work—but not the way 1998 thought. The surprises weren’t just CEOs in hoodies and legions of coders. They were barbers with booking links, nurses on telehealth, and delivery jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Looking back at that time isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. What we imagined then, and how the internet actually changed jobs—sometimes loudly, often quietly—suggests a lot about today’s artificial-intelligence moment. The late 1990s brimmed with predictions, often contradictory. On one side were promises of instant transformation; on the other, eye rolls about hype and bubbles. With hindsight, both camps were partly right and partly wrong. The internet turned out to be more transformative than skeptics allowed, yet its effects on jobs arrived slower and in more unexpected places than boosters forecast. If you were looking only for a sudden surge of “internet jobs,” you missed the real headline: The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done. That didn’t mean it was painless. The internet wasn’t a huge job killer overall, but for some occupations, it wasn’t a gentle decline—it was a cliff. The number of travel agents dropped as booking went online. Meter readers fell as utilities digitized. Other declines are still unfolding: Counter-clerk employment dropped by 30% between 2015 and 2023 as kiosks and then apps took over; telemarketer jobs fell 75% as the web provided new channels for outreach…”