
Ask HN: Did tech really revolutionize the world in the 2010s? - tempsy
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.<p>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).<p>Even things like cryptocurrency, namely Bitcoin, was birthed pre-2010.<p>It seems like a lot of the tech innovation of this decade revolve around enabling scale? And perhaps advances in Machine Learning&#x2F;AI though I don’t think we’ve yet seen game changing AI quite yet.
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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.

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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?

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username90
The big thing that happened in 2010s are cheap smartphones giving internet
access to a billion people in developing countries.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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JSeymourATL
Related: Recent Seth Godin on the cultural and intellectual schism over how
people consume information and entertainment, specifically driven by the
iPhone.

>
> [https://www.akimbo.me/blog/s-5-e-3-meta](https://www.akimbo.me/blog/s-5-e-3-meta)

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psv1
Yes. You don't need groundbreaking never-seen-before tech for this. Scale _is_
revolutionizing.

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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.

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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.

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bratelo2308
It is really&

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mtmail
Can you elaborate what you mean?

