Anything?
- Heart disease numbers dropped considerably: so many heart-related diseases and emergencies that previously would be fatal or have many more severe consequences are now survivable and livable.
- Stem cell research: even with the lack of US/federal funding, stem cell research started to bear fruit, and looks to only grow from here.
- Improved cancer survival rates for many types of cancers: Huge. We're a long way away from a real cure, but survival rates have never been higher.
- Incredible advances in arthroscopic & noninvasive/outpatient surgery & procedures: In 2004-ish I blew out the "terrible triad" of knee ligaments; my surgery scars are just little dots. My brother had similar surgery just about 6-8 years prior to that, and he bears the ugly long scar over his kneecap.
That's just gleaned from one decade-end retrospective article, and is just focused on medical advances.
But also, stop and think back to the internet in 2000 versus where we are now. There's been a hell of a lot of innovation there, as well; think of all of the things that are now possible or even commonplace to do online that were merely a gleam in our minds a decade ago...
If anything, just thinking about the pieces and foundations that were put in place throughout the 00s excites me for the possibilities of this next decade even more. It should be a very exciting time.
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.)
Arthroscopic surgery is also pretty awesome. So maybe it isn't all bleak. Maybe it's just the tech industry that has failed to do anything but sell us more crap, invade our privacy, and advertise us into submission.
The tech industry has changed significantly for the better in all of these areas.
But at least we have new ways to advertise!
The Human Genome project and sequencing.
Wikipedia is pretty substantial. All that information for free for everyone.
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.
Part of the problem is the end of the Cold War. When the U.S. was interested in "beating" the Soviet Union to space travel, etc. there were lots of things going on. Now, perhaps China and India will step up to compete in this way and drive future developments. If there aren't superpowers, things slow down.
Part of it is that some people just don't care where we are, versus where we could be. As crappy as life can be, the average quality of life still seems to be higher than at any point in the past. It seems that the majority of people stop demanding something better, once they are basically comfortable. (There are exceptions to that, of course.)
These things all have side effects, such as fewer jobs, less chance of receiving a good education, etc., so that after awhile, a small problem becomes a big one.
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.
Cheaper isn't terribly exciting, it's just .. well, cheaper. As to more storage, memory and processing power, so what? My desktop still feels as sluggish and kludgy as it did a decade ago. The use case changed. Browsers are still awful, maybe not in direct feature for feature comparison, but how we use them now (flash, ajax, multiple tabs) they're just as slow and unreliable.
If you need it then I assume it's work related so you probably have some budget available.
You'd be surprised how much fiber has been pulled in metropolitan areas.
If you're in the sticks or some small town then it's a different matter, but you could conceivably do something with channel bonding, or ask your ISP how many dineros they want for a symmetrical arrangement.
Innovation loses. Comcast wins.
I got it from these guys: http://www.star-os.com/
They really seem to know their stuff. Using that trick you could likely jump from your balcony or window sill to any location in the neighbourhood that is in line-of-sight, to get you significantly more bandwidth than you have today.
They also sell a transmitter that isn't entirely legal in all parts of the world that will do significantly longer distances.
These are ancient problems... don't expect a quick fix, especially via technology.
http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_an...
-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
Outside of cutting into people's brains and taking out in-group preferences that have existed since before the Cambrian explosion, I don't know what else you want us to do. Barack's election does say something about how far the power of racism has declined as a force in American society.
Now the rest of the world, they are still racist as hell. Try pulling the same stunt in Japan, or France.
And thats statement is not racists at all
> I know of no precedent of a leader being elected from any racial minority that makes up only 13% of a nation.
India. We currently have a Sikh PM(religious minority, 1.3%, from wikipedia), our last President was Muslim(13.43%). There have been 3 Presidents of India, from religious minority groups below 13%.
Thats not racial minority, of course, but afaik, US is yet to have a non Christian president?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_India
No, it's more culturalist. The United States has had a multi-racial society for a long time, and over the last few hundred years I think we have made strides in peaceful coexistence that few other places can replicate.
Religious tolerance, however, is not our strong suit. It was a big deal when we finally elected a Catholic (John Kennedy) to the Presidency.
Mobile phones (and the related communications) have gone from first world luxury to being more common than clean fresh water in many third world countries.
Technological development in the United States between WWII and the last decade was propelled by a couple of conditions that don't exist currently, most notably the Cold War spurring billions of federal dollars into technological research and a few big-ass monopolies dumping billions of dollars into long-term research.
The Space Race raised the profile of science and math education in the US, and quite a lot of modern technology has roots in the space program or military programs, including a lot of CS-related technologies. The internet was a military project, and the US has had AI run their logistics since 1991. A lot of industrial-type innovations, including manufacturing and deployment operations, nuclear technology, and the first digital computers even trace back to WWII. The US government was also a huge early adopter of computing technologies like mainframes, spurring private development.
Meanwhile a few large monopolies had major research labs, most infamously Bell and IBM. I'll be the first to admit that monopolies have drawbacks and usually aren't a good thing, but because they didn't have to worry so much about quarterly earnings they dumped massive amounts of revenue into long-term strategies. Such research investments are arguably important primary causes of desktop computers and our national communications infrastructure. Google and Microsoft seem to have assumed these mantles. Microsoft, for its part, is putting a lot of work into more fundamental research, although we haven't seen a big payoff yet. Google seems to spend a lot of time on pet projects like Wave. That's probably an unfair assessment, but their long-term horizons are more on the order of 18-month product cycles than 10-year research projects.
So that's my take on it. The military-industrial complex and industrial monopolies allowed for massive projects to create big-ass breakthroughs. Without those drivers, academic research has delved into political infighting for funding and companies have become myopic so our view of 'innovation' becomes faster paced, but incremental rather than revolutionary. There's been more focus on use and users, but at the cost of fundamental developments. Whether this is "better" is anyone's guess. Faster incremental improvements get to market faster and therefore affect day-to-day life more, but my personal opinion is that the pendulum ought to swing back towards the breakthroughs, at least temporarily, to give the rabid markets something big and juicy to improve upon some time soon.
When TV, Cars, Computers, The Internet were invented they were all breaking new ground in innovation because they were big areas that helped with life.
Now I think more smart people look at the way things are and can't see as many obvious things missing, so instead choose to incrementally improve what we have, either that or the goal is very ambitious and puts people off attempting, such as manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit and a cure for cancer ect
One of the most important things it does is show people in rich countries that poor people are both hard working and honest and are not in need of charity but are in need of help.
We've been stuck in a cycle of giving charity to poor countries and nothing seems to be getting better. MLs have helped to break that cycle and empower ordinary people (not warlords, clerics or politicians).
So I think that's an innovation :)
I suspect most of the changes are for the better, although I'm sure there's an argument to the contrary.
One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials science.
I think you have rose tinted glasses on the past - in 2000 I was at university where they ran NT4 with Netscape, and was rocking a Celeron 433, with a new USB1 100Mb zip drive. Now a 4Gb pen drive holds 400x more and costs 1/25th the price and tranfers data faster.
New cars today can have vision recognition blind spot checkers, radar based cruise control, pedestrian sensors, brake appliers, regenerative brakes, head up displays, Internet connections, all in ordinary models not 100k luxury ones.
The UK has migrated to digital TV and Radio. In 1999 I bought a VHS recorder, now HDD recorders are standard.
In 2000 there was nothing as good as Skype, train times were on paper in stations, airport checkins had queues, maps were paper based, polyphonic ringtones on phones were fancy, the HP200lx was the netbook of choice, the L prize for LED lights was nowhere to be seen, nor were snooks or really Amazon and Internet shopping and consumer reviewing on such a grand scale. Joule Biotechnologies, the LHC, ITunes university, the idea of an OLPC, virtual machines all absent.
China, new fastest train recently.
Now, if I had the cash, I could put a deposit down for a personal space flight!
I hear you on the computer still chugging thing, but don't want Netscape back.
Could you at least define what you mean by technological progress?
Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much faster for parallelizable algorithms, such as 3D graphics, but not for the majority of software which is serial in nature)
"access to information", "density of storage" and "communications tools" are three that I think could be argued to have improved by an order of magnitude in the last decade. I would guess though that out of those, only "communications tools" will see similar dramatic changes in the next decade (cell phones and other communication links are still pretty crappy right now) I think the amount of information on the web in the next decade will increase, but at a surprisingly modes rate.
(BTW- I hope I'm wrong and we have more exponential improvements to look forward to)
Exponential means "growth by a fixed percentage per year".
The economy grows exponentially at around 2-3% per year.
What evidence do you have that things are improving linearly rather than exponentially?
I will concede though that I'm referring to growth at a fast pace, since that is the topic of the OP. No doubt some of the items I listed could be improving at a very low magnitude exponential rate and it is a more complicated task to provide evidence that this isn't the case.