3 ms·

People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generatio

People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back. You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices. Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently. Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has. Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently. We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly. But people still think nothing is changing.

jrp 17y ago
What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.
- rglullis 17y ago
  10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started. 10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke. 10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space. 10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete. 10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago
    For a decade of advancement, your examples are very weak. Compare 1970->1980 or 1980->1990 for the change in everyday technology! I had an mp3 player in 2000. Creative released a 6GB hard drive based player in 2000 with which you'd still do fine today. It was Napster's heyday. I had a cable connection very capable of delivering video on the internet. Sure, the majority of streaming was porn sites, but the capability was there. I was using Google then, like I am now. The Startac was released in 1996. By 2000 there were many LCD phones, and the BlackBerry was available. I don't see how a tech-savvy person could not have lived a very similar life in 2000. Look at 1990 with no graphical internet (for instance) and qualitatively less computer capability, and there really isn't any comparison in rate of change.
    - ugh 17y ago
      Tech-savy, sure. But not the rest. People didn't use all that in 2000, now they do, whether or not they are tech-savy. That counts for change.

jrp 17y ago

What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.

rglullis 17y ago
10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started. 10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke. 10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space. 10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete. 10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
- WilliamLP 17y ago
  For a decade of advancement, your examples are very weak. Compare 1970->1980 or 1980->1990 for the change in everyday technology! I had an mp3 player in 2000. Creative released a 6GB hard drive based player in 2000 with which you'd still do fine today. It was Napster's heyday. I had a cable connection very capable of delivering video on the internet. Sure, the majority of streaming was porn sites, but the capability was there. I was using Google then, like I am now. The Startac was released in 1996. By 2000 there were many LCD phones, and the BlackBerry was available. I don't see how a tech-savvy person could not have lived a very similar life in 2000. Look at 1990 with no graphical internet (for instance) and qualitatively less computer capability, and there really isn't any comparison in rate of change.
  - ugh 17y ago
    Tech-savy, sure. But not the rest. People didn't use all that in 2000, now they do, whether or not they are tech-savy. That counts for change.