You wait ages for an AI chatbot to come along, then a whole bunch turn up. Why?

When, late last year, the editor asked me and other Observer writers what we thought 2023 would be like, my response was that it would be more like 1993 than any other year in recent history. Why? Simply this: 1993 was the year that Mosaic, the first modern web browser, launched and all of a sudden the non-technical world understood what this strange "internet" thing was for. This was despite the fact that the network had been switched on a whole decade earlier, during which time the world seemed almost entirely unaware of it; as a species, we seem to…