Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.

The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower progression taking 10-years for the older generations to become comfortable with shopping online.

AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.

During the dotcom bubble, people didn't have as much access to the internet as today (a lot of people were still using 56k dial-up modems at ~5 kilobytes/second of download speed) so the effect of online shopping on brick and mortar stores was more of a slow erosion than a sudden collapse. There was resentment and hand wringing about brick and mortar eventually but not until, I think, the late '00s and '10s when more of the world had high speed internet and smartphones were starting to take off.

There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.

Free Prime shipping which started in 2005 was the real killer. Before that it was more about the large variety that was simply not available in bookstores etc. so people were willing to pay extra for shipping.

The worst part is he was smirking.

At this point, people in tech are just as hated as bankers and the general public will see them as their enemies, taking away their job, but this time permanently.

Of course he knows there will be a crash in this, so its unsurprising to see this reaction. But the point is, Schmidt does not care either way as he stands to benefit and expects humanity to be paying for the tokens.

He is already prepared for the eventual backlash anyway.