Good technology is transparent. If advancements are done right, you would notice much difference.

The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000. But 2010 and 2020? This last decade has marked such massive improvements in ways we aren't noticing, and in things we aren't using. Everything from cameras with resolutions and ISOs that are off the charts, OLED, LiPo Battery density, robotics with walking and flight, guidance, wireless transmission and encoding/decoding, Machine learning in everything including your phone, and our phones... they are amazing pieces of kit. Oh, reusable rockets that land themselves! Cars that literally drive themselves. Spot, the robot dog? Right in my office right now, ultra-thin laptops, compact high quality microphones, headphones with unbelievable noise-canceling, 3-axis gimbals, 10-bit n-log external recorders, wireless solar powered remote security cameras, drones with amazing stabilized video quality that you used to need a helicopter to shoot, and on and on and on. The last decade has been insane, turning future dream tech in to Walmart black-friday super sale items. You may not appreciate or even notice the tech advancements in the last 10 years but they have been monstrous compared to any other decade.

In 1990, nobody had a cellphone. In 2000, everybody has one. This change alone has a massive influence on society.

For example, planning a trip together for, say, 30 people. It used to take weeks. Today, you can basically decide the day before to join or not.

The whole SMS thing, with minor messages delivered in seconds, changes peoples behaviour. Not being contactable in a few hours maximum is not normal today. It used to be. A small message to shop something on the way home did not exist.

The worldwide students against climate movement could not happen at that scale in the 1990's, the comm infra simply wasn' t there .

Nobody remembers phone numbers anymore.

Now that's cellphones. Add internet and GPS, and your society is massively different in a decade.

I live in a country where the SMS can take one day to be delivered. An it is in a first world country.

> The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000.

That's really not the truth at all.

Machine learning, cryptography and decentralized communications. That's about it. Nothing else really improved that much in the last 10 years, we can just make some 2010's technology cheaper.

> Machine learning, cryptography and decentralized communications.

Those alone have the potential for incredible changes.

Potential, they haven't changed important anything yet.

Probably not cheaper anymore, considering this year's supply chain faults.

We didn't have smartphones little over a decade ago.

Yes the difference between 15 years ago and now is noticable, but not so much in the last 10.

And smartphones didn't improve much after Jobs died. 120hz display and wireless charging is all of the innovation in last 2 years. Smartphone is now just a fashion statement and not really a technology.

1990 had neither GUI nor sound nor network on consumer devices. 2000 consumer device did not have video input and could not playback video even of standard TV quality. 2010 basically had all that even on mobile but lacked fast cellular data.

I was thinking about this the other day. Its been a long time since anything meaningful was invented.

The last thing i can think of was the internet. Maybe cell phones. There's probably a bunch of medical stuff, but I'm not well versed in that area.

I mean real inventions. Things that didn't exist. Like light bulbs, or automobiles, or steam engines, or rockets, or jet travel. It seems like the era of real invention petered out in the 1950's to 1970's.

Now things like social media and ad targeting and viral videos are somehow considered innovation. Even the one recent thing I'm impressed by - commercial space flight - is just an iteration of something that already existed.

I think Augmented Reality could be a big one, but it's being wasted on nonsense and filling in short term engagement targets.

That's an interesting sidebar... I generally agree with the sentiment, but GPT(-1) came out in 2018. I don't think SoCs weren't nearly as powerful as they are today and GPGPUs were still somewhat nascent, I believe. In 2011 people were still buying PlayStation 3s

I think it may be hard to see technology changes in the moment, but over the last decade alone I think we've had a number of large changes that are starting to be taken for granted.

We have the proliferation of electric vehicles and (at least in the US) a large charging network. There is also a massive difference in the wearable markets. The watches are getting so good that health monitoring and early warning signs are either already here or on the horizon. Cell phones are significantly better. A decade ago a video call would be a novelty and now it is done without a second thought. We finally have the futuristic edge to edge screens and foldables are now on the market.

There are others but they may not fall into the technology that we interact with daily. Things such as the drug technology used to make the covid vaccine. There are also changes in ML with the significant improvements in deep learning and model training.

I'm not sure if any of those count as an incredible leap, I think each one was developed incrementally, but when looking over the course of a decade it feels like a large leap to me.

Changing a feature phone for smartphone with two cameras(front and back), internet, and general computing capacity was a leap(circa 2009). Having a better camera, faster CPU, bigger screen - doesn’t feel like much. I haven’t had a desire to get a new one in half a decade(I’d keep my iPhone 7 if it wasn’t suffocating thanks to megabytes for JS on every page).