Ask HN: What major breakthroughs happened in the last 30 years?

3 points by ffitch 3y ago ↗ HN

Any field; technology, healthcare, politics, economics, chemistry, transportation. Something that directly or indirectly affected a lot of people?

5 comments

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Sony's Info-Lithium batteries got scaled up for laptop computers, cell phones, cars, etc.

Cellular communications networks. The Internet.

All of these had the fundamental work done by 1990 or so but had a huge amount of development since then.

ffitch 3y ago ↗

All three reached general public well after 1990, I'd say it counts

Wireless access to the Internet in your pocket.

ffitch 3y ago ↗

That's the one I was thinking about

ffitch 3y ago ↗

In case anyone cares, here are few things that came to my mind. Not all equally important, of course:

- GPS availability for general public

- Gene editing (CRISPR)

- Private companies in space

- Low-earth orbit Internet satellites

- Electric vehicles

- Modern Generative Adversarial Networks (Dall-E, ChatGPT)

- Online shopping (E-commerce)

- Wikipedia

- Computer beat human in Chess and Go

- Voice Assistants

- Virtual Reality

- End of the Cold War, fall of the Berlin Wall

- mRNA vaccines

- HIV/AIDS treatment

- Cloning (Dolly the Sheep)

- Gay marriages

- Satelite telescopes (Hubble, Webb)

- Untethered Mars rovers (Opportunity, Curiosity)

- Lab grown meat (and regulations around it)

- Adoption of the renewable energy sources