From the RooshV Forum:
I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.
But I disagree with this assessment of our technology. It has made steady improvements in one specific space: software and electronic hardware. That is all. On top of that, the improvements on the hardware have not even been ground breaking. GPS is a ground-breaking invention. Smaller screens are not: they are just an incremental improvement.
Smartphones are merely the result of incremental improvements in the size and quality of electronic components. The only breakthroughs involved are ages old. The invention of the transistor, the laser, etc. The existence of google, facebook, uber, and so on, are merely inevitable "new applications" stemming from these improvements. They are not breakthroughs, they are merely improvements and combinations upon the telephone, the directory, and the taxi.
In my opinion, technology as a whole is borderline stagnant.
A list of why technology is still shit:
The posting goes on to list examples of incremental, rather than breakthrough, changes in the areas of:
Have we really stagnated? Have we already found all of the "low-hanging fruit", so new breakthroughs are harder to find? Maybe there is greater emphasis on changes that are immediately able to be commercialized and less emphasis on basic research?
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Monday May 29 2017, @03:34PM
For most users of technology, the advances in hardware and in Internet connection speeds have simply enabled a mass of bloat...in commercial operating systems, software, and most all of the web. All of those use more resources sacrificing your privacy then computers of the late 90s used doing everything they did.
Some of us have been able to avoid this to some extent, as I have with by minimalist Gentoo computers. However it's tougher to escape all the other BS. I recently tried disabling NoScript because I was just plain sick and tired of the entire web being broken for me. After a few weeks however, I was even more sick of having my browser come to a standstill trying to run javascript from 50 sites in one page...and thus re-enabled it again.
Don't even get me started with the IOT crap going on. Yea...from where I sit very very little has improved, and much has just plain gone to hell.