Innovation in narrow fields is not representive of the greater whole. Sure, generative AI is booming, but mobile phones and computers haven’t evolved practically at all in the last 5 years. The general rate of innovation can be somewhat gauged in the increase of living standards, and to my understanding there has been little the past 10 years (in the West in general).
>but mobile phones and computers haven’t evolved practically at all in the last 5 years.
Lets do a fact check on this, that time span is the iphone X to iphone 14 Pro. Taking one metric, the geekbench score has gone from 2156 to 5383. So in that time phones have become more twice as fast. It released with ios 11, I wont even bother to list all the major improvements between 11 and 16 because it's a huge list.
There is so much more to expand on this but when even the most obvious stats show dramatic improvement, there isn't any point detailing the differences in camera, connectivity, features, etc.
Some people will argue that's simply incrementation and not innovation, even though there's serious innovation needed to jump from 10nm to 5nm architecture.
Even at that, if you want to simply do 'novel innovation' in things that are truly new or change your process...you can get phones with folding screens these days, that's pretty cool and wild to think about.
You can take better photos, have a longer lasting battery, send emergency sms via satellite. Scan objects and rooms with LiDAR, generate ai images locally with the massively improved SoC. Just to mention a few things off the top of my head. Just because _you_ aren’t doing anything interesting with the new tech, doesn’t mean innovation hasn’t been happening.
I agree innovation is happening, what I mean is that meaningful life change isn't happening. Yes I'll be thankful to be rescued if the emergency SMS works.
Phone benchmarks getting bigger arbitrary numbers as an example of innovation has to be a joke right?
Fundamentals like the existence of mobile internet is HUGE. My phone giving more or less the same access to video, messaging, and webpages as it did in 2013 is stagnation.
In the past you could have centuries without any changes that weren’t social/political.
The fact we can even see quantifiable change in our lifetimes is completely new and limited to the last 200 or so years.
And nowadays we can see significant change from decade to decade.
It’s like looking in a mirror. You see it everyday so of course it doesn’t seem like anything’s changing. You need to look at the bigger context and look at the forest instead of trees. Try Hans Roslings 200 years in 2 minutes talk.
These are all neat things, but I think i'm looking at it on another layer than these kinds of technological things.
I had always thought it was George Carlin, but maybe this was actually penned by a pastor in the 90s?
"The paradox of our time"
(first paragraph)
" We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgement; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry quickly; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom."
- Taller buildings, shorter tempers: Yes, unclear (I think the average person today gets in fewer physical fights)
- Wider freeways, narrower viewpoints: Yes, unclear (I think in many ways we were even more narrow-minded 20 years ago. Do you remember the "Nuke Iraq" mentality?)
- We buy more but enjoy it less: Unclear, unclear
- we have bigger houses and smaller families: Yes, Yes
You're also missing the point that "innovation" in software does _not_ translate to "improvement" for a large part of the population.
You can use an app on your pocket-supercomputer to get a less-than-minimum-wage "independant contractor"/slave to bring you junk food at 10:00pm ? Sure, "Innovation". Is it "progress" ? Does it improve your life ?
