Bob Metcalfe, The Man Who Discovered Network Effects, Isn't Sorry

ChatGPT warned me against asking legendary engineer Bob Metcalfe about his 1996 prediction that the internet would collapse. This came after I sought the chatbot's guidance on what questions to ask the man who this week received the ACM Turing Award, the $1 million prize dubbed the Nobel of computing. The AI oracle suggested I stick to quizzing him on his famous accomplishments--inventing Ethernet, starting the 3Com Corporation, codifying the value of networks, and teaching students in Texas about innovation, which he did until he retired last year "to pursue a sixth career." But ChatGPT thought it was a terrible idea to bring up Metcalfe's bold prognostication, just as the network he'd helped pioneer was taking off, that the volume of bits zipping around the internet would cause the mother of all crashes. OpenAI's black box told me that since Metcalfe's guess had flopped in a very public manner, I'd be risking the honoree's pique if I raised it, and from then on he'd be too annoyed to share his best thoughts.