For me the difference is agency.

A telephone, automobile, steam engine, etcetera were all hammers. Just tools. They did enable massive change, but essentially the change was driven by people.

The Internet and Social media has resulted in massive information sharing. Massive cultural sharing. Massive echo chambers. The folks who thought the world was flat all by themselves in their kitchen were told by others that they were being silly. Now they get to find others who think the world is flat and thus their belief is reinforced.

The reinforcement happened because of agency. The social media algorithms were actively joining like minded people together to get more clicks, and thus more attention to be sold (or more accurately more ability to influence the buying decisions of people).

I think AI and agentic frameworks built around AI will be social media algorithms on steroids. My use of ChatGPT4o or Claude 3 Sonnet etcetera has demonstrated that a straight forward prompt can result in an impressive set of words that sound convincingly like a person. Analysis and summarisation is superb. What this suggests to me, as the models get ever more efficient and intelligent, is that shortly they will be able to act independent of human guidance (as the algorithms do) and they'll be able to adjust their strategy (something algorithms can't do).

To me the AI we'll have on the scene soon will be like introducing a new class of intelligent being into the mix of society. This has never happened before and I think the results of this will be different to any revolution of society in the past where the new tech was hammers.

This time it is smart hammers. Hammers that can decide what to hit and how hard to hit it.