Mildly Interesting

In the year 2100 or 2200 the internet as we know it may have been superceded by methodologies we can’t even comprehend right now.

It's gonna be fax machines again, isn't it?

I will say, the internet in 1998 looked nothing like the internet today. There was barely any commerce at all. 1998 is maybe the year you'd start to say that Amazon "made it", but even then the common take from established reporters was that they'd never be able to compete with brick and mortar booksellers like Barnes and Noble. To the extent that the average person was even aware that you could buy things on the internet, it was mostly because they'd heard that it was dangerous to use your credit card online.

At the time, the web was still pretty small. Google launched in 1998 -- prior to that Yahoo was the most popular "search engine", but Yahoo was mostly a human-curated list of web pages organized by topic. Windows 95 was still what most people used, and it didn't even come with a TCP/IP stack enabled.

Certainly not a brilliant prediction, but it's hindsight that takes it from "pretty mediocre take" to "comically stupid".

In a 2013 interview, Krugman stated that the predictions were meant to be "fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting"

It's not a real Nobel Prize, it's a Bank of Sweden prize and it's a better reflection of Swedish economic politics than true innovation in the field (probably because economics is more applied philosophy than science).