
End of a Decade - amursft
https://www.amursoftware.com/blog/end-of-a-decade
======
thundergolfer
There's a lot of.. weird stuff in here.

\- The idea that Apple, Amazon, and Google entering into healthcare would be
taking healthcare services "away from centralized gatekeepers." What?

\- Two lines about Climate Change in the whole post, and the 2nd is "We’ll
remember this as the decade of unfortunate procrastination." That's quite the
understatement.

\- "We’ve also had more equal access to the good parts of economic growth."
This needs explanation. Who is "we"? What are the "good parts" and the "bad
parts" of growth?

\- "Everything has gone from centralized to distributed." No, not everything.
In many important ways the opposite has happened. eg. corporate
conglomeration.

~~~
amursft
thanks for the critical feedback and thoughts.

as another poster put it, perhaps disintermediation would be a better word to
describe it. Individuals now have power to do things that they didn't before,
or for much cheaper. Can see this happening in healthcare once 'big tech' is
involved. It will be good for healthcare costs at least in the United States.

any suggestions to improve it? or do you think the decade will be remembered
for totally different things?

~~~
bobthepanda
Decentralization in healthcare is basically not going to happen unless the US
stops giving tax exemptions for employer-provided health insurance.

------
phoe-krk
> Everything has gone from centralized to distributed.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google like this. (Microsoft also does.)

The illusion of decentralization given by "you don't need a publisher, you
need Amazon" and "you don't need marketing, you need a Facebook page" is one
of their most successful creations. We haven't gone decentralized. We've given
even more power into singular technology monopolies and eliminated many of the
intermediaries that gave us actual choice of who to ask for publishing and how
to market our products.

Now it's "sell it on Amazon"/"market it on Facebook" or you just don't exist
at all.

~~~
pjc50
I think he should have written "disintermediated" for those examples. There
are now fewer intermediaries, maybe only a single layer - but the companies in
that layer occupy almost all of it.

You can publish books without having to worry about publishing and
distribution - if you go through the publication-and-distribution vertically
integrated monolith.

~~~
phoe-krk
I agree. Publishing overall is substantially easier.

Publishing without going through the publishing monopoly is substantially
harder though.

~~~
Nasrudith
This may be a minor distinction but it is easier to publish but harder to get
reach when disconnected. This is important in a "allowed to try" way.

Generally for books and music the answer for "should I sell on Amazon, Apple,
Barnes and Noble, Soundcloud, or my own website" is "yes".

In addition to convenience people are understandably leery about where they
put their credit card info and the financial infastructure hasn't generally
caught up although there are a few "one-off" credit card number generators.

------
rvz
> The healthcare system is broken in ways that are hard to fix.

So we need more of the same old FAANG guys to 'fix' this? Do we really want
our health data to be controlled in the hands of these FAANG companies because
they are able to disrupt anything they touch? I hope not.

> What should we take away from the 2010 decade?

2010s: Was the discovery of democratising access to anything by 'programming
an app for that' with collecting user data from a tool called a smartphone,
which brought in a surge of unprofitable app / web companies IPOing everywhere
and crazy tech companies raising ridiculous funding rounds with huge losses
with little to no profit. I cannot see this continuing on into the 2020s. So
my so-called 'machine learning crystal ball' forecasts something else.

2020s: Will have a tech crash due to this hyperactivity of these startups
which many of them will shutdown. The transportation market will start to
shift to carbon neutral alternatives over fossil-fuel based solutions in the
late 2020s. AR will beat VR to consumer mainstream and will overlay our daily
lives with wearables. Cryptocurrency becomes a financial alternative in the
mid-2020s. Privacy will be more controversial and questioned by many users as
we keep giving it away to be collected by FAANG companies and we start to have
information which can be easily faked making it easy to spread disinformation,
ie. mainstream fake news.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to buy this cryptocurrency dip and to prepare
my tinfoil rucksack and to continue to buy multiple newspapers from the local
shop across the street. Hopefully that should be my new-decade's resolution.

~~~
buboard
> Do we really want our health data to be controlled in the hands of these
> FAANG

Then we should stop deliberately giving it to them? E.g. in the name of
privacy, Google has secured health data access for its own machine learning
systems , to the exclusion of everyone else who is working on health ML. Laws
like HIPPA were meant to facilitate the anonymous sharing of health data, not
to block it. Health feels like a hugely lost opportunity exactly because
nobody wants to touch that data with the current legal repercusions.

------
chansiky
I think for sure the rise of app and web economies have been the defining
characteristic of this decade. They have had an unexpected monopoly on our
attentions. From memes, to changes in consumer behavior, to social uprisings,
to mass shootings, to instagram influencers, to determining elections, it
would take a lot to convince me that there was not a single greater force that
influenced us more in the past ten years than the side-effects of what came
out of a few internet companies. Its almost hard to imagine what life was like
before things like twitter, uber, spotify, youtube, and to think that they
were either only a few years old or barely taking their first steps at the
beginning of the decade is mind-blowing.

In hindsight, a lot of people might claim they saw it coming, but a lot of the
things I see today are things I would have never predicted the "future" to be
like, and were never things I ever heard anyone predict prior to the events
happening. Seriously, all these amazon boxes everywhere? ... how many people
saw that coming? For sure none of the real estate developers who poured
millions into building all those shopping malls now lifeless like the coral
reef on a warm 2019 summer day.

As for whats to come in the 2020's? clearly - flying cars, jet-packs, laser
guns, self cleaning rooms, holograms, shiny pants, and robot servants. /s

~~~
varjag
> Its almost hard to imagine what life was like before things like twitter,
> uber, spotify, youtube, and to think that they were either only a few years
> old or barely taking their first steps at the beginning of the decade is
> mind-blowing.

All things you listed were founded in the previous decade, and indeed nothing
in tech of this decade would be shocking to someone in 2009.

Based on this I expect the next decade will also see very little innovation.

~~~
imtringued
The difference is that it is now part of daily life, even in developing
nations. In the 00s it was mostly the early adopters in rich western countries
that were using modern tech.

~~~
varjag
Not in 2009..

------
newshorts
The comments about neo liberalization at the end make me wonder if the “20s”
will be remember as an era of Anti globalization and nationalism.

We saw it start to take hold about halfway through this decade and I wonder if
the trend will continue.

~~~
isostatic
Rising nationalism in the 20s and 30s eventually leading to major armed
conflict from 39 onwards.

~~~
alexgmcm
Let's do the time warp again!

~~~
isostatic
We seem on track to avoid the jump to the left in the UK, alas we've already
stepped to the right several times

------
agentultra
Teaching our kids about Siri and Alexa... and how to subvert it.

By not participating. Reading books. Enjoying time together at a park. Finding
mirth in games and late night conversations.

By teaching them to pick up their own groceries, shop local, use the library,
see local performances, and enjoying our neighbourhood.

If 2010’s were all about staying in and binging on Netflix I hope the next
decade will be about getting out and letting our computers gather dust.

~~~
SamuelAdams
The author's later point is that this may not be an option.

"Where a home just has one of these [AI / connected home]. Like an in-sink
trash disposal, or an answering machine."

Consider phones. In the early 2000's, most people had a cell phone. By 2010,
most people have a smart phone. These devices are much more capable than their
predecessors. I've read books (Hans Rosling, Factfulness) that suggested
communities with access to smartphones have a 3% GDP increase over communities
with cell phones. That number may seem small, but remember it's a global
scale. 3% is a significant amount.

The current state of AI is where cell phones were 20 years ago. We may get to
a point where not using AI (as you said, "not participating") may put yourself
at a clear disadvantage - you will not be as capable as your peers.

It's sort of like those 50-60 year olds in the workforce who refuse to use a
computer. They've always done their job a particular way, but they are not as
productive as some of the younger hires who use computers. Then they are
shocked when they are laid off - their current (disadvantaged) output is far
below what is expected, since technology has become ubiquitous and people
expect you to be able to use a computer to do your job.

------
larnmar
I feel like decades stopped having distinctive identities somewhere round
2000.

Previous decade-by-decade changes from the 50s to the 60s to the 70s to the
80s to the 90s were, it must be admitted, mostly aesthetic rather than being
the “fundamental changes in society” that people like to pretend — people in
general didn’t become greedier in 1980 and less greedy again in 1990. But
there were huge changes in the aesthetics of everything — clothes, interiors,
graphic design, music, cars etc.

What has changed since 2004, in the actual physical world?

~~~
jdnenej
Meme culture has been massive this decade and it's not just online. I
regularly see memes in street art or stickers on light posts. I also think
it's just that we haven't had enough time to judge yet. In another 20 years
when things have changed you can reflect on them instead of it being the
current reality.

~~~
buboard
Memes are last decade. It s old technology nowadays tbh , i wonder how come
kids still use it

------
barce
You mention gatekeepers going away, but aren't the barriers to doing
information warfare held by the same gatekeepers (the monied and the state)?

------
csomar
> With 6 billion people on the planet

Did he just miss 1.7 billion people?

~~~
amursft
Haha, thanks. I did. Do you mind if I incorporate your point? I was speaking a
bit colloquially, but the correct number would be better.

~~~
csomar
> Do you mind if I incorporate your point?

Not sure what this means. But if you mean correct the error, then you
certainly should and you don't need anybody permission.

------
ptrinh
Bitcoin was introduced in 2009-2010.

------
Cougher
I can't help but think that the end of printed instructions can be shoehorned
in here somehow. If I do get printed instructions with something, they're
virtually unusable either because the type is far too small to read, or
because it's all hieroglyphs without words. When I look for instructions
online, I'm finding videos more and more often, even for something like a
recipe.

------
randomsearch
> It turned out that someone had stolen my card information and bought two
> copies from their own Amazon listing

Far more likely is that you've stored those card details and your Amazon
account was compromised, internally or externally.

------
mirekrusin
Tinder in the main bullet points but not cryptocurrency/blockchain (hype or
not, whatever, it was big thing throughout the decade), the "big bang" of deep
learning or quantum computers?

~~~
thundergolfer
Crypto is not a normal part of “everyday living”, which is what those bullet
points are concerned with.

~~~
mirekrusin
Says who? Number of just bitcoin users is more than order of magnitude higher
than number of users of tinder.

~~~
thundergolfer
Really? I would not have guessed that at all, seeing as basically everyone I
know my age has used a Tinder-like dating app, but maybe 1-2 have used bitcoin
as everyday currency.

Got some figures?

------
kohlerm
That picture looks like the Saarschleife in Germany.

~~~
kahirsch
[https://unsplash.com/s/photos/star%C3%BD-
hrad%2C-nezbudsk%C3...](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/star%C3%BD-
hrad%2C-nezbudsk%C3%A1-l%C3%BA%C4%8Dka%2C-slovakia)

------
gsich
The decade is not over. The gregorian calendar has no year "0", so decades
start at for example: 2011-01-01 till 2020-12-31.

I don't use it that way either.

~~~
summonedskul
Wrong -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s)

The 2010s is the current decade in the Gregorian calendar that began on 1
January 2010, and will end on 31 December 2019.

~~~
gsich
Not wrong. Gregorian starts at year 1. If you want a decade to be 10 years, it
can't end with 10, that would be only 9 years.

Daily usage differs from that definition of course, but that's not the point.

~~~
summonedskul
No you are wrong - The word 'decade' is not tied to any specific set of 10
years, so you can mark off any set of 10 years and call it a decade:
2000-2009, or 2005-2014, for example. By your logic the year 2000 should be
part of the 90's which it wasn't.

~~~
gsich
I'm not wrong. Read the "specs".

>By your logic the year 2000 should be part of the 90's which it wasn't.

It was according to the gregorian calendar.

~~~
summonedskul
but you're still wrong - _this_ decade ends at the last moment of 2019..that's
the _agreed_ popular opinion - didn't you even read the Wikipedia link?

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "What should we take away from the 2010 decade?"

Take that is not over yet, the 2010's will end in over a year from now, so
still plenty things to happen inside this particular decade.

