
What Happened in the 2010s - notlukesky
https://avc.com/2019/12/what-happened-in-the-2010s/
======
davewongillies
[http://web.archive.org/web/20200101123154/https://avc.com/20...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200101123154/https://avc.com/2019/12/what-
happened-in-the-2010s/)

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ksec
May I ask why the Web Archive version is posted?

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adventured
AVC.com was apparently being hammered by an avalanche of traffic. Not long
after the articles about the 2010s and 2020s were upvoted to the HN front
page, the site was persistently returning database connection errors. So
archive links were posted in both threads.

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iamaelephant
I very strongly disagree with #3. Machine learning has not yet proved its
value outside of a handful of key areas (image recognition, voice
recognition/synthesizing, etc). I think it's entirely possible we'll look back
on today as a kind of machine learning mania. I certainly believe there is
plenty of room to build sustainable businesses without a machine learning
asset (and the associated data collection), and it's in no way "table stakes
for every tech company, large and small".

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m_ke
You're wrong. Machine Learning is driving all of the ad placement on major ad
platforms, personalization on all top social/media apps, search ranking for
google, translation, speech recognition, finance, fraud detection.

In the next decade it will start taking over computer graphics, medicine,
manufacturing, surveillance, hardware / software and every other aspect of our
lives.

EDIT: for people who are downvoting me, here are some examples of how machine
learning is and will transform our lives:

1\. 3D graphics:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlgLxSLsYWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlgLxSLsYWQ)
Andrew Price doesn't have a technical background but does a decent job
summarizing some of the ways deep learning will transform computer graphics.
Soon all of the mocap, character design and animation will be driven by deep
learning systems.

2\. Computer Architecture and Traditional Software:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpKWOuzOxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpKWOuzOxc)
There's a ton of recent research showing that you can use machine learning to
beat human crafted heuristics in hardware, scheduling, compiler design and
query planning.

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ken
ML is certainly valuable for speech recognition, translation, and fraud
detection, but those are somewhat niche applications. It's a long way from
"every tech company, large and small".

As for ad placement, social media, and search ranking: is that actually
effective? The one constant with ads and social media and web search, IME, is
that it just never gets any better. From the Lycos/AltaVista days to Google
there was a huge jump in search result quality, and then it plateaued.

The ads I see online are still laughably bad. They're more professionally
produced than 10 or 20 years ago, but they're still never for any category of
product that I'd ever buy. Targeted and tracked advertising seems like a big
scam.

~~~
m_ke
> ML is certainly valuable for speech recognition, translation, and fraud
> detection, but those are somewhat niche applications. It's a long way from
> "every tech company, large and small".

Those were just some of the most visible examples. OCR, image recognition, NLP
and speech recognition alone are enough to revolutionize most data entry jobs
and we'll see a ton of startups using them to do just that for every industry.

There are countless other examples of machine learning applications, including
drug discovery, radiology, production line quality assurance, etc.

> The ads I see online are still laughably bad.

Have ads ever been good? You see the ads that you're seeing because someone is
paying a lot of money to put them there.

Bloomberg spent 120 million on ads last month, ad platforms had to find
eyeballs for them.

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hakfoo
IMO, you can get a pretty good ad experience by sticking to content-targeted
ads.

If I'm looking at, for example, "how to programmatically control my model
railway with a Raspberry Pi", there's a large number of easy to target,
relevant products you can advertise against that. You don't need a gigabyte of
creepy backstory on me to figure out "hey, show me ads for the products
mentioned in the article, and there's a good chance I'll buy them because it's
convenient."

Yeah, Mike Bloomberg might be willing to pay $1 to show his ugly mug next to
that page, but the ad from a modeler's supply shop, who would only have paid
95 cents, would have felt much more appropriate to the consumer. I know some
ad networks try to measure quality via clickthrough rate, but I'm not sure it
was weighted in a way to nerf this issue.

Another problem is that a pure-content model doesn't extend to all types of
site. There's no suitable product to advertise against "six die in New Year's
party gone horribly wrong." and nobody wanted to run low-yield CPM branding
ads, so they had to backfill wth retargeting and profile-based ads instead.

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medymed
In medicine, the 2010s may be remember as a period of explosive growth of
engineered therapeutics. This is driven primarily by better understanding of
diseases (and their molecular targets) and also by an expanding reach of bio-
engineering platforms. Monoclonal antibody approvals especially have
accelerated briskly for inflammatory conditions (there are 13 or more for the
skin condition psoriasis alone) and perhaps more famously redefined many
cancer treatment regimens with checkpoint inhibitors. Chimeric antigen
receptor T cell (CAR T cells) are (very) expensive ex vivo gene-edited cell-
based treatments, and other platforms for gene editing with are nearing or
entering trials. This trend does not appear to be decelerating or plateauing.

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cortesoft
I think one of the big tech developments (hinted at in the article but not
called out) is on demand video streaming and what that has done to how we
consume media. It has changed the type of things we watch.

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toastking
On demand music as well. It's ironically lead to a bit of a monoculture with
music that's concerning. Streaming arguably caused the whole kerfuffle with
this year's Billboard list: [https://www.stereogum.com/2068655/billboard-top-
rock-songs-i...](https://www.stereogum.com/2068655/billboard-top-rock-songs-
imagine-dragons/news/)

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hateful
I was just thinking about the whole "what happened in the last decade". While
the 90s ended with the rise of the web, and the 00s saw the rise of what we
can do with the web, the 10s felt like an experiment of what NOT to do with
the web.

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ksec
I am surprised with no mention of Smartphone. Which is arguably the most
important innovation in modern history.

2010s, Smartphone ( iPhone 3GS at the time ) went from niche to 4B users (
iOS, Androids and KaiOS ), that is nearly every person on earth above age 14
in developed countries. I dont think there has ever been a product or
technology innovation as important that spread faster than Smartphone. And it
changes everyone's life. The post mentioned of Google, Facebook and Amazon
empire, all partly grows to this point because of Smartphones. Technology
companies together now worth close to 10 Trillions. The whole manufacturing
supply chain exists and became huge in Shenzhen because of Smartphone. It was
the reason why TSMC managed to catch up to Intel in both capacity and leading
edge node. It was the reason why we went from 3G to 5G in mere 10 years
because of all the investment kept pouring it. It was the reason why everyone
went on to the Internet and had Internet economy. It brought a handheld PC
_and_ Internet to a much wider audience.

I would even argue it was the Smartphone innovation that saved us from the
post 2008 Financial Crisis doom as it created so much wealth, innovation and
opportunities.

And the 2nd most important thing not mentioned in the article. ( May be it is
not important to others... )

We lost the man who bought us the Smartphone era; Steve Jobs.

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brlewis
> subscriptions better align the interests of the users and the developers of
> mobile and web applications and avoid many of the negative aspects of the
> free/ad supported business model

The most significant negative aspect that subscriptions avoid is ephemeral
spambot accounts. If a user account costs money, there's way more disincentive
for behavior that will get that account banned.

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purplezooey
It's sad, the point about the bay area. We could have done a lot more but
nobody wants to make any sacrifices. I hope in the next decade the state will
take a larger role and force local communities to drastically increase
housing, density, and transit rights of way.

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twblalock
I've lived in the Bay Area for most of my life and I have zero confidence the
situation will improve. It would have happened by now if it was going to.

The transit situation in particular will not improve because people prefer
cars. People have little experience with public transit, and the experience
they do have was bad, so they don't see themselves using it on a regular
basis. They want to live in suburbs and drive cars, and they will try very
hard to prevent anyone from increasing the density of housing or transit
anywhere near their houses.

Those people vote, so a state government that tries to push for more public
transit and housing density would not do well in the next election.

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buboard
personal blogs are still crashing as if it's 2010. that must mean, not much
happened

Edit: ok read the rest.

\- according to his admission, the subscription model did not scale

\- missing is the effect of planet-level monetary policy that massively
benefited shares and their largest owners

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toastking
Yeah he's so close to getting the idea that the World Bank and the neoliberal
monetary policy caused this inequality.

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H8crilA
What does the World Bank have to do with this?

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CM30
May as well give some thoughts on this:

> 1/ The emergence of the big four web/mobile monopolies; Apple, Google,
> Amazon, and Facebook

I'm not sure you could class Apple alongside some of the others for monopoly
power either. They're still less popular than Microsoft for desktop operating
systems, Google for mobile ones and virtually every other major service in
their other areas of business.

Apple is a very profitable business, but they're arguably more of a luxury
goods maker than a monopoly right now, especially outside of tech circles.

> 2/ The massive experiment in using capital as a moat to build startups into
> sustainable businesses has now played out and we can call it a failure for
> the most part.

This is an interesting point, and I definitely wonder how it'll affect the
tech industry in future.

> 4/ Subscriptions became the second scaled business model for web and mobile
> businesses, following advertising which emerged at scale in the previous
> decade.

Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really
poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films,
TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain
products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't done
nearly as well as expected.

For instance, subscriptions still haven't worked in the media industry for
news/journalism, as much as certain publications are hoping they would. They
also haven't done too hot in the games industry either, if Google Stadia's
performance is to be believed. Jury's still out for YouTube/Twitch creators
too, with Patreon type services being the de facto monetisation method right
now. Free with ads has usually beat out subscriptions when in competition with
it.

> 7/ Technology inserted itself right in the middle of society this decade.

It sure did, though it's more like people took notice this decade, since the
political tides went one way rather than the other.

> And the stagnation of earning power in the lower and middle class is
> absolutely the result of technology automation, a trend that will only
> accelerate in coming years.

It's effects on politics will accelerate too, as shown by this decade's move
towards more extreme political parties and policies worldwide. This might not
end well, especially with environmental issues caused by global
warming/climate change at the same time.

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RestlessMind
> Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really
> poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films,
> TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain
> products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't
> done nearly as well as expected.

A pattern I identified was that subscriptions work really well when property
rights are strong and enforced strongly (TV shows, movies, music, books etc).
It doesn't really work well when property rights can be bypassed easily or
have a convenient alternative (you want to read NYT story without a
subscription? read that story on some other outlet).

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williamDafoe
Very few new capabilities for mankind were discovered in the last 10Y mainly
CRISPR and CAR-T therapy and two level neural networks (Google translate,
alphago). Lithium-Ion batteries got 50% stronger and 6x cheaper (see photo in
[https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72c...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72ct5hNM7)).
Most scientists focused on confirming what was already there (gravity waves,
higgs boson, water on moon, water on Mars, etc ). Carbon fiber increased
passenger air travel efficiency and became commonplace in bicycle frame
design. The 2010s were not a creative decade ...

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mmaunder
"...the fact that the tech sector has such a powerful role means that it will
be highly regulated by society."

I think this reality will arrive hard and fast in the 2020's. The breadth and
depth of regulation globally will depend on election outcomes. But it will
happen either way. GDPR and CCPA are just a taste of what's to come. We'll see
regulation in several key areas including:

\- Social media's goal of increased engagement vs mental health.

\- Cross border cybersecurity.

\- More jurisdictions adopting GDPR/CCPA-like privacy laws.

\- Cloud providers (consumer in particular) and vendor lock-in vs portability.

Some is already happening, but expect to see a ramp up. Don't interpret this
as me being pro/anti regulation. Just a reality that's coming IMO.

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heavenlyblue
OMG yes.

I find it funny that there’re still so many CEOs that I speak to and they are
constantly pushing the idea that tech should not be regulated.

Even if you’re right, there’s probably not a single politician out there who
wouldn’t use that as a way to build their career on.

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whyineedaccount
In my opinion, machine learning is going to replace all of us, now or in the
future. We don't know but it will eventually happen, not in this decade...

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Lerc
>the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world
view.

There is a lot of industry built around supplying the half a trillion a year
military. They are well practiced in resisting reductions in funding. If the
US becomes isolationist does that military might get turned inward.

Which option do you think is more likely

a) Stop buying so many toys

b) Overflow our sandpit into the rest of the yard

c) Play with our toys in other peoples' sandpits

Isolationism requires cutting out c as an option.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Looks like you commented on the wrong article. You're quoting the 2020s piece.

