[blfr]

I didn't miss the massive progress in IT. I mean, obviously I didn't, we're having this conversation on HN.

However, progress in IT, in bits, while fine and useful, is simply not as powerful as progress in more basic industries, in atoms. Having the means to (over)feed seven billion people (1940s tech spread around the world) is more important than having the means to (mis)inform seven billion people (1980s tech spread around the world).

[Gravityloss]

Look at a smart phone. Just the physical parts like the battery, the cpu, display and power electronics are completely different to technology in 1990.

How do you get information or deal with payments? It's the smartphone. Many people in developing countries benefit immensely from this change. Or refugees or travelers. And on software services side, we have similar improvements - the smartphone would be useless without the services it's used with. How many hours of queuing have we eliminated since now you can do those things online? In my country almost nothing requires physical presence anymore. And also, millions of people can spend their time on something more productive than sitting behind a counter, serving customers for trivial things.

Although, ironically, these hacker news discussions could have content wise been had in the usenet already in the eighties. No similar upvoting / downvoting crowd moderation though, which did kill it as a discussion platform once the masses got access.

What other technologies look completely different? People laughed at wind and solar power. They were completely unviable as power sources.

Cars used leaded gasoline. Diesels were rolling smoke stacks. Air quality in cities was terrible. Now we have electric buses.

On the other hand, there have been regressions. Nuclear power was being built at a fast pace in the late seventies and early eighties. It's way slower now.

[koshergweilo]

> On the other hand, there have been regressions. Nuclear power was being built at a fast pace in the late seventies and early eighties. It's way slower now.

Counterpoint but I think one of the reasons for this is that wind and solar are lower-capital alternatives to building nuclear powerplants. Not spending the capital to maintain existing powerplants does seem like a regression to me though, so we're on the same page there.

[ivan_gammel]

It is not just about informing people, but also automation of many things. It is certainly more powerful transformation than invention of steam engine. It has transformed industry and agriculture on a similar scale, enabling many things that were not possible before, but it also transformed our society, changing the ways we communicate, learn, entertain and find partners.

[blfr]

The difference between having a tractor and not having a tractor is much larger than between having a computer/gps-guided tractor and having an old school tractor. While it's certainly an improvement, it's a smaller improvement.

The difference between hailing a taxi via app and hailing a taxi by waving at it is much smaller than the difference between automobiles being available and not being available. Again, it's a great improvement but a smaller step than the original one.

Marriage rates are down so that abundance may be overrated.

EDIT: I don't know about steam engine but all these are certainly far behind an internal combustion engine.

[juve1996]

These differences aren't the results of taking less risk. They're the results of the technology being low-hanging fruit.

The low-hanging fruit is gone now. There could be some revolution that comes - but physics is at a standstill and has been for decades. Most of the gains are coming as evolutions, not revolutions, focusing on optimization.

[ivan_gammel]

It depends on where to look for examples.

E.g. in agriculture there's a huge difference between a water pump (or a water wheel, both - incremental updates from a bucket with water) and computer-controlled watering system, which can deliver significant increase in yield or even save your crop during drought.

[throwaway0a5e]

I can order a widget from literally the other side of the world or plan a party while taking a dump. Access to communications technology makes me a lot "richer" in a practical sense. Heads of state in the 1990s with tons of administrative labor at their disposal didn't have access to the same level of information and communication that normal people do today. The amount of man hours spent on "paper pushing and record keeping" type labor for a given end result has shrunk drastically making a level of "paper pushing and record keeping" that was formerly only the purview of states and large organizations available to the every-man.

Thanks to technological progress administrative paper pushing and clerical activity has become cheap enough for lots of people to have access to it the same way fresh produce became cheaply available over the 20th century.

[varjag]

The standard of living of heads of state in 1990s was pretty solid from modern perspective. Even if they couldn't get an earwax picker off AliExpress while taking a dump.