For me number 1 has undoubtedly been generative AI. I am still blown away by what GPT-4 is capable of and in recent days I have enjoyed creating images on Bing Image Creator (which uses Dall-E) and have been impressed. The next few years are going to be very interesting especially the integration into productivity apps.
2 would be foldable phones. I have the Galaxy Fold 3 and like it a lot. Being able to carry a small tablet everywhere is great and once you get used to the bigger screen it’s hard to even think of going back.
3 would probably be the Oculus Quest 2 which I used heavily for around a year. While VR was around in 2018, the first Quest was a big leap in terms of standalone VR. The Quest 3 has just been announced and seems a fair leap forward also so it’s good to see Meta continuing to push VR.
In fact my dream app would be a combination of generative AI and VR where you can use voice commands to prompt the creation of 3d objects and environments which you can then walk around in VR. I think it should be possible in a few years.
I’m much in agreement with you except for #2 – to me cell phones are strictly utilitarian and 95% of my usage is … wait for it … making phone calls! The other 5% is texting, almost all of that being responses to those who are apparently incapable of making phone calls.
But I agree with #1 and #3. ChatGPT is just amazing and clearly represents a real breakthrough in AI. My son has one of the newer VR headsets, though I don’t remember if it’s Oculus or one of the other ones, but it’s one of the ones that has a couple of position-sensing lasers mounted in the room. You can walk around and explore and even interact with the virtual environment. It’s pretty impressive.
I’ve been impressed with the advances in EV technology. Maybe the tech hasn’t changed that much, but it’s certainly much more prevalent over the past 5 years.
I meant to put this in IMHO but seems to have landed in Cafe Society. I suppose some of the topics like generative AI and VR fit here as well but overall it would probably be better in IMHO.
It’s undoubtedly very important technology, but “impressiveness” tends to be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the basic technology is over 100 years old (Jay Leno has a 1909 Baker Electric, although its performance is distinctly unimpressive compared to a Tesla!)
TBH, the most important advance in EVs has been the wide availability and lower costs of lithium-ion cells. Had these been available in the late 90s the fate of the EV1 might well have been different. Besides various political issues, the EV1 was caught in a self-reinforcing chicken-and-egg conundrum between poor performance and lack of demand.
I don’t know exactly how recent this is, but I’m more and more impressed these days with how much stuff you can do on a smart phone when traveling. I was in Europe this past October, and all my tickets for planes and trains, and all hotel reservations, and event tickets, were all accessible on my phone. On previous trips I’d have a sheaf of printouts with scannable codes.
Maybe this is all just old fogey “I remember when…” stuff, because I was already a traveler in the days of the CAA books, Thomas Guides and booking flights with a live person over the phone. But nowadays with the ease of searching trivago, hunting for discounts, reading reviews and so forth, I’m kind of baffled as to how my parents booked anything for family vacations back in the 80s.
I had the same thought about my childhood vacations too. I imagine travel agents were a big part of the process especially for international travel.
Incidentally one piece of tech that I discovered recently was Google Lens’s real-time translation feature when you hold it over some text. The first time I used it was definitely one of those moments when tech seems like magic. Would imagine it would be hugely useful during international travel too.
An app with that function appeared a few years ago, but only in four or five languages. It was surreal to literally look at the screen as you hovered over a menu and saw totally different text. Once it merges with a solid translation program and can fully understand proper sentence structure changes from language to language (as opposed to a word-for-word translation), it’ll be utterly essential.
I’m going to be contrarian here, but I’m not so sure that all the machine learning applications are all that revolutionary for the past 5 years.
From what I gather, the biggest single piece of the pie was simply getting to the point where enough computing resources could be applied to problems. In other words, the theoretical underpinnings have been there for a long time, but we just never had the degree of available computing power to run them until maybe 10 years ago. Since then, it’s been more of a matter of refining and applying it, and ChatGPT isn’t anything particularly revolutionary except insofar as someone set it to being able to generate text that makes something approaching sense.
Most of the things that are “revolutionary” are just different aspects of machine learning- the translation apps, stuff like better IVRs, predictive maintenance, etc… are all just machine learning applications.
What I want to see is the large scale AIs used for things that actually matter. For example, if you were to link a bunch of garbage sorting robots and have them continually updating themselves with feedback on how successful they were at sorting garbage, they’d get really good really fast. In other words, if the bot in Seattle got feedback on whether a particular piece of trash was a can, plastic, or paper, that could be applied in Tallahassee, and you’d have this going on 24/7 around the globe. Something like that could make a real difference in landfill use, recycling viability, and so forth.
And the same goes for EVs; we’re merely seeing the integration and commercialization of stuff that’s been around forever, and not anything particularly revolutionary.
My favorite new tech from the last five years is the overhauled search function. Remember how it used to always crash and then make you wait 120 seconds to even try to use it again? We are truly living in the future.
Not entirely accurate. Large Language Models are barely five years old and have beceome impressively powerful only within about the last two. What’s really happened, as is often the case in major software advances, is a confluence of both advances in software engineering and related AI methodologies with advances in hardware capacity to accommodate them. It definitely has not been due to increases in computing power alone. That said, once large-scale LLMs have been created – meaning LLMs with many trillions of words of high-quality textual datasets and billions of parameters – their power in the short term does seem to scale with increases in the dataset size, number of parameters, and the amount of computing power that was consumed by training.
Yeah I mentioned that VR has been around in the very quote that you put up. However the last five years have been huge for standalone vr . In particular the Quest brought roomscale features in a standalone headset and the controllers were lightyears ahead of earlier standalone headsets like the Oculus Go which itself raised the bar for VR in a cheap standalone headset.
Wolfpup mentioned a VR headset with position-sensing lasers which can sense where you are walking; this could be the Oclulus Rift or HTC Vive. The remarkable thing about the Quest is that it delivers the same roomscale technology without any wires or mounts. And it only costs a few hundred dollars. It really is a landmark in cheap, accessible decent VR.
We got AAA tourbooks or the like, for our destination, and looked up accommodations there. We called an 800 number to book the room. Sometimes we even mailed a check to cover the cost.
We got roadmaps. If the car broke down, we had to hoof it to the nearest place with a pay phone to call for help. Airline tickets would be mailed to us (or we could go by the airport to get them, or we got them from a travel agent) - and had multiple pages, one for every leg of the trip plus one to serve as a receipt.
Nowadays, I could go on a lengthy trip with just my phone in my pocket. OK, I’d have luggage, too, but in terms of logistics, the phone does it all.
E-bikes. I guess they existed before, but they’ve exploded in affordability and accessibility. I’ve had mine for a year now and it’s already paid for itself between time saved taking the bus and money saved on Uber.
Speaking of the bus, you used to have to walk up to the stop at about the time you expected it to be there and it was anyone’s guess whether it’d be on time, or was running 15 minutes late, or it passed by early. Now I can pull up an app that shows me exactly where the bus is, how many minutes until it gets to my stop, and whether the bus is crowded or not.
The quality of cameras on smartphones. My vision is 20/20, but every now and then I’ll come across some text so small that I can’t read it. The camera on my phone now has enough precision that I can point it at the text, zoom in, and read it flawlessly.
Mobile ordering apps for chain restaurants. This may be one of the best things we got out of the pandemic forcing restaurants to innovate. Just about every restaurant now has an app where I can order, pay, and then just walk in and pick up my order without having to stand in line or wait.
