While SSDs have been around for a while, they have only been commercially viable (for both home and enterprise use) for maybe 10-15 years.
Today, even a 300 dollar desktop 3d printer (especially a resin printer) will beat even the best industrial printers from just a decade ago.
For less than 50 bucks per month I can get an internet connection at home that’s 16000 times faster than what I had in 2004. Back then, I had to wait minutes to load a single photo, today I can stream three dozen 4k videos at once and still have bandwidth to spare.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated vaccine research a lot. We finally got mRNA vaccines to work and are now applying them to other diseases as well.
Ten years ago, the idea of fully reusing rockets was laughed at. The first time a first stage was reused was in 2017. Today, most new rocket designs are planned as fully or at least mostly reusable.+
First mass market VR headsets came out in 2012. We are are just now at a point where untethered headsets are reaching usable resolution and framerate. New headsets add features like eye tracking, finger tracking, external cameras for augmented reality…
And those are big changes, but consider some of the changes from 1994-2014:
Laptops went from a premium item for classy business people to a common household item
most households didn’t even have an internet connection in 1994, in 2014 most households had broadband
wifi
the birth of online commerce
the birth of social media
literally Google
we went from CD Players to iPods to having all the functionality of an iPod in everyone’s phone, to streaming any music we want from cloud-based services
we saw the birth and (relative) death of internet radio
while we’re on that topic, podcasts came into existence
we went from independent video stores to Blockbuster to Netflix DVD to Netflix streaming and Hulu as a competitor
furthermore, video streaming over the internet did not exist in 1994. Hell, we hadn’t even started pirating music online at scale yet. You still had to record the radio with a cassette deck in '94.
video games went from SNES and Genesis to PS4, XBOne, and WiiU. We’re talking Super Metroid vs Dark Souls II, or for handhelds, compare the Gameboy/Game Gear to the PS Vita/3DS. If you look at 2004 vs 2024 you’d be looking at KOTOR vs Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s a much smaller contrast. Likewise if you look at 1984 vs 2004 it’d be from King’s Quest I to Halo 2. And just for fun, 1974 to 1994 would be dnd to Final Fantasy VI
hybrid cars were invented
hydrogen fuel cell powered busses came into existence
video calls went from highly expensive, borderline sci-fi (see, e.g. Back To The Future Part II and the Pokemon anime) to being built into peoples’ smartphones, tablets and laptops
Since 2004, we got smartphones which replaced a huge chunk of technology, internet has become far faster and more accessible leading to streaming services like Netflix and freelance video platforms like YouTube exploding, far fewer people having cable TV, kids growing up with online video rather than TV, social media went from simple platforms meant for communication with friends and family to behemoths meant to capture as much of your attention as possible, misinformation has become more trustworthy to many than traditional news, public school classrooms gained access to technology like Duolingo as learning aids, physical media has been phased out in basically all homes except those with video game consoles, software purchases have been replaced with subscriptions, and now we have programs that can create realistic-looking images and videos, human-like passages, and real-sounding speech.
Saying that none of that is as groundbreaking as the Internet is kinda like saying the Internet wasn’t as groundbreaking as electricity. Just because the effects are subtle doesn’t make it any less groundbreaking.
Much of the changes you describe are big improvements/changes that happened gradually over time (so, not “very new”). I would describe those as iterative improvements, not groundbreaking besides the notable exception of the AI explosion of the past 3-4 years.
We’re already seeing mass layoffs. You might not have realized if yet, but there’s now more competition for your job, as people in jobs easily replaced or minimized by LLMs are now considering what to try and do next.
Even if your job simply cannot be done by AI, that state is temporary, and it can be done by all the people who will become jobless because their old job can be done by AI.
I’m feeling rather snooty tonight so I’ll go ahead and quote Bob Dylan:
Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
There will be a way through this, but it will mean either the extinction and creation of many job species resulting in a change in how we spend our days which is a huge component of life (consider a textile worker versus an uber driver as jobs and hence lifestyles), or it will mean the introduction of UBI, or both. And that’s all massive change.
Very interesting that you don’t have any examples. The only actually useful things i have seen LLM’s do is potentially translate ancient documents and work towards translations between unrelated language groups. Other than that i have seem zero actual societal improvements from anything tech bros call “AI”. It is only the next hype bubble all the crypto bros have moved onto
20 years ago most people had cellphones, laptops, and social media.
Not in my social circle. We’re middle class Canadian. People had phones, but they were used almost entirely for interpersonal messaging.
I feel like the pairing of social media and cell phones really came about around 2010 or a bit later. Services that always had new content, provided social scoring/klout, and were available in the palm of your hand were newer.
If we go back thirty years, there were plenty of precursors but nothing with broad penetration in society.
20 years ago most people had cellphones, laptops, and social media.
Right, and now we have “phones” with zero buttons, microscopic pixels, speech recognition, facial recognition, real time editing of video calls to make you look like a cartoon dog, games, dead reckoning and GPS navigation, artificial intelligence that can help you start a religion or plan a wedding, show you a graph of how much you’ve walked over the last twelve months on an hour by hour basis without you even knowing it was doing so, take slow motion videos in super HD that a sports network would have paid a hundred million dollars for twenty years ago, show you satellite imagery of any point on the planet, or a 3D model of the city you’re in including the buildings, start your car remotely, translate text in front of you like a magic window, warn you when you might be in danger of a fall based on detecting variations in the motion of your pocket as you walk, play first person shooters using realistic weaponry from WW2 with people in your neighborhood, show you a sequence of people in your area who might want to fuck and set you in a chat with the ones you mutually like, order a car and let you specify the temperature and music selection of that car before it arrives, ssh into any server on the internet, pay for tolls without slowing down (thanks AT&T, you were right), open your front door or give you a view through the security cameras in your house, present video games for your fucking cat to play when it’s bored, like, authenticate using a 3D model of your head that it, itself, generated based on like ten seconds of observing your face, survive being fully submerged in water, charge without connecting any wires … it is utter nonsense to say not much has changed in twenty years because — get this — we had pocket phones back then too.
You talk about technology but what’s really changing is how much worse the culture becomes. We have some kind of a monoculture now with total groupthink.
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The changes in technology from 1984 to 2004 is mind boggling fast when compared to the minimal changes between 2004 to 2024
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You may be looking at the wrong things then:
And so on…
And those are big changes, but consider some of the changes from 1994-2014:
Ten years ago the falcon 9 was running flights to the ISS. 9 years ago was the first successful booster landing.
Since 2004, we got smartphones which replaced a huge chunk of technology, internet has become far faster and more accessible leading to streaming services like Netflix and freelance video platforms like YouTube exploding, far fewer people having cable TV, kids growing up with online video rather than TV, social media went from simple platforms meant for communication with friends and family to behemoths meant to capture as much of your attention as possible, misinformation has become more trustworthy to many than traditional news, public school classrooms gained access to technology like Duolingo as learning aids, physical media has been phased out in basically all homes except those with video game consoles, software purchases have been replaced with subscriptions, and now we have programs that can create realistic-looking images and videos, human-like passages, and real-sounding speech.
Saying that none of that is as groundbreaking as the Internet is kinda like saying the Internet wasn’t as groundbreaking as electricity. Just because the effects are subtle doesn’t make it any less groundbreaking.
I agree with the vast majority of your comment, but this irked me a little:
Here’s the definition of the word groundbreaking, per the Cambridge Dictionary:
If something is groundbreaking, it is very new and a big change from other things of its type
Much of the changes you describe are big improvements/changes that happened gradually over time (so, not “very new”). I would describe those as iterative improvements, not groundbreaking besides the notable exception of the AI explosion of the past 3-4 years.
If you don’t think AI has changed recently I don’t think I can give you any evidence that you’re wrong.
Ai may of changed but life hasn’t changed due to Ai.
We’re already seeing mass layoffs. You might not have realized if yet, but there’s now more competition for your job, as people in jobs easily replaced or minimized by LLMs are now considering what to try and do next.
Even if your job simply cannot be done by AI, that state is temporary, and it can be done by all the people who will become jobless because their old job can be done by AI.
I’m feeling rather snooty tonight so I’ll go ahead and quote Bob Dylan:
There will be a way through this, but it will mean either the extinction and creation of many job species resulting in a change in how we spend our days which is a huge component of life (consider a textile worker versus an uber driver as jobs and hence lifestyles), or it will mean the introduction of UBI, or both. And that’s all massive change.
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Do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that using a dismissive term actually closes a topic?
I work a factory job and watch baseball ain my free time. What has ChatGPT done that has actually changed anything?
Perhaps some things other than your factory job and baseball? Just a thought
Very interesting that you don’t have any examples. The only actually useful things i have seen LLM’s do is potentially translate ancient documents and work towards translations between unrelated language groups. Other than that i have seem zero actual societal improvements from anything tech bros call “AI”. It is only the next hype bubble all the crypto bros have moved onto
Why can’t it play baseball?
Such a blissful comment.
Not in my social circle. We’re middle class Canadian. People had phones, but they were used almost entirely for interpersonal messaging.
I feel like the pairing of social media and cell phones really came about around 2010 or a bit later. Services that always had new content, provided social scoring/klout, and were available in the palm of your hand were newer.
If we go back thirty years, there were plenty of precursors but nothing with broad penetration in society.
Right, and now we have “phones” with zero buttons, microscopic pixels, speech recognition, facial recognition, real time editing of video calls to make you look like a cartoon dog, games, dead reckoning and GPS navigation, artificial intelligence that can help you start a religion or plan a wedding, show you a graph of how much you’ve walked over the last twelve months on an hour by hour basis without you even knowing it was doing so, take slow motion videos in super HD that a sports network would have paid a hundred million dollars for twenty years ago, show you satellite imagery of any point on the planet, or a 3D model of the city you’re in including the buildings, start your car remotely, translate text in front of you like a magic window, warn you when you might be in danger of a fall based on detecting variations in the motion of your pocket as you walk, play first person shooters using realistic weaponry from WW2 with people in your neighborhood, show you a sequence of people in your area who might want to fuck and set you in a chat with the ones you mutually like, order a car and let you specify the temperature and music selection of that car before it arrives, ssh into any server on the internet, pay for tolls without slowing down (thanks AT&T, you were right), open your front door or give you a view through the security cameras in your house, present video games for your fucking cat to play when it’s bored, like, authenticate using a 3D model of your head that it, itself, generated based on like ten seconds of observing your face, survive being fully submerged in water, charge without connecting any wires … it is utter nonsense to say not much has changed in twenty years because — get this — we had pocket phones back then too.
You talk about technology but what’s really changing is how much worse the culture becomes. We have some kind of a monoculture now with total groupthink.
Younger people don’t notice this I guess. :)