Video, it turns out, did not kill the radio star. When MTV launched in August 1981, the choice for the first video played on the nascent music channel, The Buggles’ 1979 hit, Video Killed the Radio Star, was clearly deliberate, a pronouncement that we had firmly moved into a new era of visual music entertainment, which would consign the medium of radio to the dustbin of history.
Yet, MTV will be shutting down its main channels at the end of 2026. And radio? Well, if you consider that the medium has evolved into new areas like podcasts, which are essentially talk radio programs, it’s stronger than ever. This certainly goes against the grain of what was assumed in the 1980s and 90s, and even in the 2000s.
And it’s important today because there are a lot of tech trends that cause ‘experts’ to predict what future industries will look like, especially when it comes to AI.
Back in the late 1990s, there was a lot of talk about how digital disruption would make certain industries obsolete. Digital disruption is basically the supplantation of a traditional industry by a digital (online) alternative.
The most famous example is the arrival of Netflix, and later other streaming sites, destroying the Blockbuster Video model.
Sometimes digital disruption plays out differently
However, there are countless examples where the predicted disruption either failed to happen or where both the traditional industries and new digital ones continued to thrive.
For example, you can play online casino games anywhere these days, and internet casinos are thriving, but there has been little to no dilution of the revenues of land-based casinos. Similarly, after years of assuming that physical music media was dead, we are now seeing booming sales in vinyl and CDs.
The point, as such, is that assumptions about the death of an industry due to an alternative evolved through technology can be wide off the mark.
To give another example: the arrival of the Kindle and eReaders was once said to spell doom for physical books, but, like vinyl records, physical book sales are on the rise, and quite healthy in sales.
What makes it more interesting is that the sales of physical books are being driven by the demographic most accused of being too ‘digital’ – Gen Z.
So why is this important? Well, there is a sense out there that technology is inevitable, and it is apparent when you look at AI at the moment that the world is changing in anticipation of what AI “might do.” There are job losses, for instance, across industries like digital arts, marketing, voice acting, copywriting, and countless others.
We aren’t saying that these job roles won’t be replaced or impacted by artificial intelligence tools, but it can be dangerous to assume that they are.
OpenAI, which is the most visible AI behemoth due to the success of ChatGPT, is making a bet of trillions of dollars on the technology, mainly due to massive deals for chips with companies like Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, and others. But here’s the issue: OpenAI’s revenue was $4.3 billion for the first half of 2026. That’s revenue, not profit.
So, you can appreciate, that it’s a gamble when it is spending, let’s say conservatively, one trillion dollars over the coming years on compute. Its revenues are going to have to rise by extraordinary levels – and fast – to meet its expenditure.
AI may change industries in different ways than expected
Once again, we aren’t saying that OpenAI is wrong, but it must be recognized that it is making a huge bet – one that could have huge implications on the global economy if it goes bad – on mass AI adoption.
It’s not only adoption in the general sense, either, as OpenAI and many other Big Tech companies are gambling that the adoption of AI generates huge revenues.
What that means is that it goes beyond people downloading image generators to create viral videos. It requires real use cases and the transformation of both the internet and many traditional industries. It’s possible, perhaps probable, but not certain.
There is a viral image that does the rounds on social media showing an old newspaper clipping from the 1990s, with the headline “Internet may be passing fad.” The image is often used as an example of how tech adoption is inevitable, and those who fail to see it can be made to look foolish.
Yet, as we have argued above, it sometimes does not work out the way we think: video did not kill the radio star, and Amazon did not kill the book.
So, while we can make assumptions that the AI revolution will change everything, some of those assumptions might look wide off the mark several years from now.
