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by ible 4243 days ago
I recently went on a trip to Paris (~250BC). Finding commercial flights (1969) and good hotels took minutes and I didn't need to talk to anyone (hipmunk(2010)/tripadvisor(2001)). I checked out the area around the hotel (1950) on Google street view (2007). My family kept up to date on where I was via find my friends (2011) on my iPhone (2007). My phone showed me where I was through Google Maps (2005) and directed my with a built in compass (2009?). I used city mapper (2011) to figure out how to get around efficiently on the Paris metro (1900). The trip was noticably different from my last one. Last time to take decent pictures I carried a consumer affordable DSLR (2007), this time I carried my iPhone 5. In 2007 I tried to take panoramas and had to very carefully take individual shots and stitch them together laboriously in software afterwards that took hours to run. This time I took one on my phone and shared it with my family 30 seconds later. I took hand held time lapse videos. I live translated signs with WordLens (2010) after failing to learn much French with DuoLingo (2011). I could go on and on like this about all the changes. Many in the last 10 years or less.

Yes I could have done basically everything I did this time last time. Maps and compasses aren't new. There were tour guides available, and smart phones, and language classes. But the experience was qualitatively different.

If I was feeling early adopter instead of like relaxing maybe I could've done some things that weren't possible last time, like driven in an electric car that is among the best performance cars in the world, tested self stopping or self parking or self driving cars, toured with a consumer VR rig, taken a video with a self-piloting quadracopter, or gotten my genome sequenced, or watched a streaming video from the space station, or....

That's what I could come up with in a few minutes while writing this comment and searching on wikipedia. If you can't get excited about all the innovations happening right now oh boy are you doing it wrong.