Why do you posit that this is a lot more important than the Internet?

Artificial intelligence will 'infect' every surface of life and business. The Internet is merely a distribution platform for intelligence (and yes that includes TikTok videos). Its first distribution chore was slow and quaint, it was human. The intelligence was always the higher value, not the distribution network.

Distribution of intelligence: data, photos, video, communications, transactions, entertainment, et al.

And to be clear, it doesn't matter if some random commentors on HN don't think very highly of some or all of the intelligence being distributed. Their elitist opinion of the quality of intelligence of a given thing doesn't matter as to whether it's happening or not.

When a 16 year old records a cloned TikTok dance video, edits it, and then publishes it, that's intelligence distribution. That's a person thinking through a series of actions to try to communicate to an end audience, via an entertaining medium. That's intelligence being distributed over the Internet. That's the quaint, slow, human form of it.

Up to this point that distribution was basically entirely human, capped (post saturation) at slow growth N intelligence output (derived from the total number of humans and their time / productivity capabilities). AI uncaps that and radically expands intelligence output & distribution at a growth rate that is so fast you might as well start picturing the planet having tens or hundreds of billions of people on it. The human population will shrink, the artificial population will increase dramatically. People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.

A few decades from now the notion of thinking of computing separate from AI will be so foreign most people won't understand what you're talking about. It will just be thought of as computing. Humans will forget a time when we weren't augmented by the constant presence of artificial intelligence. Try taking 'smart' phones away from the masses. In about a decade try taking away their helper agents. A decade after that try taking away their home robots.

The steroid jump is AI + robotics. The Internet is trite compared to what comes out of that over the rest of this century. Robotics will physically remake our world, in a way the Internet can't. We'll deposit tens of billions of robots onto the surface of the planet and they will almost all be the result of having figured out how to make intelligence (relatively) easy & (relatively) cheap. I'm not talking about Roombas.

The Information Age is over. We're into the Age of Intelligence (insert the unavoidable quips about humanity & intelligence).

The Internet is just one way to move intelligence around (a robot body is another, a smartphone is another, a human body is another, and so on). It's a sub value to intelligence broadly. Intelligence is the ultimate value. The valuations (and sales growth) for OpenAI and Anthropic is because they're vast intelligence output machines in the Age of Intelligence, ditto Nvidia's business boom. We can now mass manufacture intelligence at an accelerating clip, and it has gotten cheaper at a comical rate over the past few years. While HN comments snort about pelican improvements day to day, the leap over a few years is astronomical in regards to what significant AI systems can now do (with LLMs being just one type of that).