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Ask HN: Did tech really revolutionize the world in the 2010s?

14 points by tempsy ↗ HN
As the decade nears an end, and having lived in SF for most of it, I’ve started to reflect on this past decade and thinking very hard on how tech has changed the world over the last 10 years.

I will spend more time over the next few weeks and months thinking about it, but my first reaction is that the products and companies we most associate with “tech” today are still the ones that existed before 2010, like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft, but just at a bigger scale. And as far as “new tech companies” go, large “startups” like Uber and AirBnB were both stared before 2010 and again are really just larger versions of the same idea (e.g. no significant pivot).

Even things like cryptocurrency, namely Bitcoin, was birthed pre-2010.

It seems like a lot of the tech innovation of this decade revolve around enabling scale? And perhaps advances in Machine Learning/AI though I don’t think we’ve yet seen game changing AI quite yet.

16 comments

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eaenki
The past ten years little happened. But computer vision and batteries improved quite a bit. With those two things, I expect to see the rise of the robots in the next two decades. Transportation, deliveries, arms in healthcare and manufacturing and construction. Even personal robots and flying electric vehicles. I’m optimist, but all those things are in the atoms world, so it’ll take decades with the occasional Tesla to accellerate things. Still, the seeds have been planted in the last decade.
username90
The big thing that happened in 2010s are cheap smartphones giving internet access to a billion people in developing countries.
psv1
Yes. You don't need groundbreaking never-seen-before tech for this. Scale is revolutionizing.
iamnothere123
Nothing revolutionizing happened.

The scale of things aren't a wow factor. Just compare the scale of something to 10 years ago and that to 20 years ago. The growth rate would have been the same.

eb0la
The only revolution I can think of is renewables taking over fossil energy production.

In the last 10 years wind and solar went to scarily expensive to feasible substitures for fossil duels but this happened one little step at a time with incremental enhacements it those technologies.

macando
What's often overlooked by the people working in tech is how mobile phones positively impacted the lives of older people.

"The Mobile Phone Generation by Fred Wilson

...

But maybe the most amazing thing, to me anyway, is that my mom has pretty much stopped using her land line phone. She tells everyone to call her on her mobile phone. For a generation that arrived on planet earth around the same time as the rotary telephone to be abandoning the landline phone in favor of a mobile phone is really something to see.

If you think about it, though, it makes all the sense in the world. As you find it harder to do things that you used to take for granted, having your own personal computer on you or near you, that allows you to talk to your friends and family, via audio or text, see what everyone is up to, and get someone to come pick you up and take you to Church, the doctor, the store, or anywhere else, is really incredibly useful. "

https://avc.com/2019/05/the-mobile-phone-generation/

buboard
smartphones are still not easy to use for older people or other less skilled people. i dont' think tech did a good job there
macando
Can you elaborate or compare with some other tech that is easier to use for them? I think using a smartphone is no harder than driving a car.
buboard
imagine a 70 y o learning to drive then. Feature phones are easier, they have a button that reliably terminates the call even if you inadvertedly press some wrong buttons
macando
Learning to drive in your 70s should't be that hard. From what I understood by reading the blog post, older people want features not feature phones. Do you want to be able to learn and have access to whatever is the latest tech when you're in your 70s?
buboard
> It seems like a lot of the tech innovation of this decade revolve around enabling scale?

sick and tired of reading about containers k8s etc. Those are google's scale problems, not of the revolutionizng company that is starting today. Scale just made centralization easier.

One question i have is whether in the past 10 years, due to the advent of too much javascript / virtualizations / taxing UIs, inefficient programming languages the compute requirements has increased drastically, increasing tech's footprint for no particular gain.

jobigoud
In the 2010s drones revolutionized photography and movies. Amateurs can now do aerial photography and for pros many shots requiring helicopters or that were previously just impossible are now done with drones.
zachlatta
Internet adoption grew from 26.6% to 58.8% of the world's population, largely as a result of increasingly cheap and high quality smartphones.

All of human history and knowledge is now at the fingertips of the majority of humans alive today. I can't imagine something that gives me more hope.

How can you say nothing revolutionary happened?