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Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

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Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#11

Post by gkefalas »

brlewis wrote: post #10

This has been a great decade for computing. 1.4MB removable storage was the norm 10 years ago. Right now I have incredibly fast 4GB removable storage in my pocket. Ten years ago we didn't have USB 2.0. Wireless protocols weren't as good. Digital cameras were mostly toys, and digital video was almost nonexistent. CVS was state-of-the-art version control. Hosting was expensive. I love 2010.

Agreed! Technology has continued to march on, and entirely new product categories have gone from "an idea"to gain popular usage. I mean, even just the advances in pure hardware and technology manufacturing are pretty impressive and have opened up so many more possibilities than what we had a decade ago.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#13

Post by PieSquared »

gkefalas wrote: post #7

In terms of medical advances, there may not have been any major blockbuster disease cures found, but there were several very important advances & innovations. I'll crib from ABC News and call out a few that I think are impressive as a layperson: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-top-10-m... - Heart disease numbers dropped considerably: so many heart-related diseases and emergencies that previously w…

An anecdote about noninvasive surgery and such.

My mother had a similar injury. She blew out ligaments on her right knee in 2002, and then one her left leg in 2008. Look at one leg, you see a big scar from the top of the knee to the bottom. Look at the other, you see pretty much nothing. (Also, it's great. You can endure that type of trauma twice, and still be participating in intense sports such as alpine skiing and such.)

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#15

Post by mechanical_fish »

drcode wrote: post #14

I agree completely- I don't know why so many people insist that technological progress is improving at an exponential rate when the empirical evidence seems to contradict this so clearly.

... and what empirical evidence would that be exactly? Surely, if it is empirical, you can cite it!

Could you at least define what you mean by technological progress?

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#17

Post by gabrielroth »

There were a lot of innovations in the financial sector in the last ten years, because that's where a lot of the incentive to innovate was coming from. Unfortunately, some of those innovations were very destructive, and most of the rest had no benefit to society. There were probably some new tools that resulted in more efficient allocation of capital, but those gains were swamped by the damage done.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#18

Post by jsz0 »

I think you're being a bit too hard on humanity..

-Dozens of extrasolar planets discovered. -Confirmation of water on Mars. -Completed the principal construction of ISS -Cassini–Huygens -AIDS drug therapy drastically increasing life spans -US elects a black President -Lowest number of homicides in the US since the 1960s

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#19

Post by mechanical_fish »

whatusername wrote: post #12

The # of people lifted out of extreme poverty in China/India is pretty substantial. The Human Genome project and sequencing. Wikipedia is pretty substantial. All that information for free for everyone.

Lifting people out of poverty is pretty important. The biggest bang for the buck in "curing diseases" is getting more out of the cures we already have. Just because malaria is old news in the USA doesn't mean that it doesn't kill 1.5 to 3 million children per year.

Remember, also, that a side effect of technological progress is complacency. These days we don't applaud when medical geniuses cure the pandemic flu within less than nine months of the first US case (have you noticed that there's an H1N1 vaccine now?); instead we complain that it wasn't cured far enough in advance. Or we allow statistically ignorant people to start moral panics about rare or nonexistent side effects of the new cure.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#20

Post by jacquesm »

I think it may be that you simply have enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that you want to do, would you be willing to pay a premium to get more ?

I have 20Mbps here and 90% of the time I'm under 10% usage.

And I consider myself a pretty heavy internet user.

Innovation is probably not measured very well by looking at your DSL upload speed.

A decade ago your pc would have been running at 3 to 400 MHz tops (single core!), have 32M of ram and maybe a 40G drive (if you had the money).

By those measures the price of storage and of processing has come down considerably. (edit: and don't forget the SSD revolution that is about to become true, if you like spinning media have a good look at them because they're about to go extinct).

And then there are lots of fields outside computing where we have advanced tremendously in the last decade, one of my favorites is the 'camera pill'.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3606947/

But there are plenty of others.

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