Born in 1890, my great-grandfather had great-uncles who fought in the Civil War. He saw the invention of the automobile, the airplane, two world wars, and saw the Apollo 11 moon landing a month before he died.
I was born in the 80s, I have been trying to take stock of how much life has changed since then. Cable television? Satellite television? Cell phones to smartphones? The internet? Life hasn’t seemed to have made much progress. When we get down to it life isn’t radically different now than it was in 80s. Just hoping there is more that I’m simply not noticing
For me, the last “ah yes, the future” moment was going from “broadband” to seeing real fiber at a friend’s house that was 100x faster. Insanity at the time :)
If you remember navigating with a compass and map, GPS is goddamned magical.
Honestly if you’re not putting the internet and the general proliferation of personal computers and then smartphones in the “truly innovative” category, then I’m not sure anything will make the cut—I’d make the argument that both are more innovative than flight which is something we can observe in nature.
I don’t see very many humans naturally flapping their arms flying around very often
There was that one guy, but I’d say it was more falling with style than flying
… and he didn’t stick the landing
After reading the comments here, I see the problem: You judge past things by what they have become, and new things by what they are. Nothing will ever be “truly innovative” by those standards.
The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage. The airplane was a pass time for the ultra rich, while anyone else got by with hot air balloons if they wanted to fly. The soviets got to space first by pointing a ballistic missile upwards.
We have CRISPR and can alter the Genes of any living organism to match our needs, but oh well, it’s only used by labs right now and anyone else got by perfectly fine by selective breeding, can’t call that innovative, can we?
… The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage…
100%. To add:
Automobile was actually slower than the horse for good many decades.A good horse is like 3 horsepower at least :)
If you think that the internet is not revolutionary, what right do you have to claim that automobile ever was?
Gene Editting with CRISPR and other techniques. Eventually this will be truly personalized medicine at an affordable fee.
Fusion with more power output than input will become a game changer. Currently we have done fusion but the energy to do the demonstration was in total more than the output
Well, I disagree with the premise.
But perhaps one of the more obvious physical examples are Blue and White LEDs (1992). Small gadgets used to always have red LEDs, maybe green ones, or an unlit 7 segment display, everything else was too expensive or too energy consuming for battery powered devices. And not only that, RGB Diodes also saw the end of pretty much all cathode-ray tubes.
You see kids, back in the olden days before white LEDs, the only way to get blue light was to throw high energy electron ray on a phosphor coating. So anything blue or white before the 90s was made with that technology, from car radios to TV screens.
I’d personally also keep an eye out what the cheap electric motor will do next. From “hoverboards”, civilian drones, e-scooters and the modern e-bike, it’s only a matter of time before the new use case will emerge.
Accurate and repeatable motion systems.
Born too late to say that semiconductors are the thing for me, but the use has made closed loop control systems viable. Along with stepper, servo, and now new to me piezoelectric motors and linear stages.
Katamari Damacy
Naaa.
Na na na na na na na, na naa naa na na na
3d printer
I’m a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there’s been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I’ve been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!
I’m not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there’s lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they’re boron grades but I can’t recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it’s processed. It’s allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.
Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there’s aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.
Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.
It’s oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don’t need to do things like plan around liquid batching.
Medicines and medical care have improved significantly
Same could be said about everything we have though couldn’t it?
Cars, aircraft, boats… All improved significantly…
But is any of it truly innovative?
If my son was born when I was born, he wouldn’t be alive and my wife may not have survived the birth. If he was born 5-10 years ago, he’d have brain damage. Today, because we know what to look for and how to treat and prevent many pregnancy problems and early childhood problems he’s alive, healthy and thriving. There are a million innovations that are super niche, so we don’t know about them.
Yes, we’ve certainly progressed in nearly every field
But are they truly innovative or are they a natural evolution of something that already existed?
Yeah. I think it is.
I am also thankful that my children were born in this era as well
There has been significant progress in the treatment of cystic fibrosis
Still not the kind of innovation I am talking about
Yes. Taking an existing thing and improving upon it is the literal definition of innovation.
Not the definition I am referring to
- introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking.
Conceptually, improving upon something isn’t entirely original
It can be hard to grasp. We can’t imagine what life and the mindset of people were before a concept existed because we have always had it.
Yes, we can imagine the difficulty of travel before the invention of aircraft
But it’s hard for us to understand the profound difference to life and everyone’s worldview at the time
People fantasized about human flight for what seemed like forever to them, so long that it became a fantasy that many believed would never be realized
Then suddenly it was
What have we experienced collectively since the 80s that is like that?
I disagree. Improving an existing concept and changing it to make it more practical or easier to produce for example is innovation.
The examples you gave in the introduction are examples of that: The parts that make an automobile existed when it was invented and you could argue again that it wasn’t a completely novel idea but an improvement of the steam engine and horse-drawn vehicles.
The airplane massively relied on improvements in engine and material design.
Your assessment that innovations used to be completely original in their design and are not any more is a fallacy.
I also disagree
Your reply in of itself is a fallacy
An airplane relying upon improvements engine and material design does not negate the very real revelation of human flight to the world
Nor does your oversimplified and ultimately incorrect explanation steam engines and evolution of horse drawn vehicles
Especially considering the first automobiles were steam powered
It completely misses the point
The horseless carriage itself was the innovation
I apologize for not explaining the question more thoroughly
I am talking about innovation in a fully realized concept
I always thought that flying cars would be the next major leap in innovation, but it’s still in its fledgling stages
I’d say the iPhone. A truly innovative, smart phone. When it first came out, I mean.
As unpopular as this may be, LLMs (aka. “AI” like ChatGPT).
I don’t think we’ve seen something that’ll change the world as much as I think it will since the Internet was introduced. It will change the way we interact with computers. For a lot of people, it already has.
Don’t use them tꝏ often , specially not enough to know how gꝏd they truly are . But if want basic info about some thing , don’t like sifting thru pages and pages of search engine garbage . LLMs I used automate that process and consolidate the info into something fairly easy to understand
Peops hate LLMs bcus they supposedly “turn peops brain to mush” , but … what if my brain’s ALREADY mush ? Think this’s one instance LLMs might help more than hinder , so shouldn’t be discarded entirely
Life is vastly different than in the 80s. You can literally know anything you want right now, simply by asking an artificially intelligent handheld computer that has access to every discovery known to man. We’re on the cusp of being able to cure almost any disease and live forever. We can blow the planet up 10x over and still have ammo left. Scientists can see so far away that they can almost see the beginning of time. Nothing your great grandfather saw in his life will compare to what you will see in yours, have already seen.
