While “smart” phones have been a convenience boost for me, they’ve been a game changer for rural areas. Some countries in Africa have cell phone penetration that far exceeds electrical grid connectivity, bringing access to better pricing information for farmers, banking, etc.
All of these things are cool and impressive… on the much more frivolous side, I find it incredibly satisfying that you can hold up your phoneand find the name and album of the song that’s currently playing with near 100% accuracy in seconds. Many times you can even whistle or hum into your phone and it still works!
I can work anywhere in the world that has good internet access. Many others can as well. COVID taught us that.
Many others, of course, cannot.
It’s been IMHO a HUGE change in the way society works.
Please, everyone that has this opportunity to work from home must realize this and give appropriate tips and kindness to those that can’t.
Meh. I’ll stop for fast food but most of the time it’s food of convenient opportunity, meaning I’m driving along & there’s a ___ to pull into. In that case, I’m already there when I’m ordering so I can’t see it saving me more than maybe 10 seconds. Order & a quick trip to the small room means I’m not really waiting anyway. Sometimes I’ll plan to stop at, say, this Mickey D’s or that Wendy’s enroute but they’re all at least ½ hr from home & I’m not playing on the phone while driving.
The James Webb Space Telescope impresses me far more than anything people can do with their phones.
This has definitely been a wholesale change in society - COVID taught us that a lot of interactions can be done remotely. And so, now, Zoom has entered the lexicon as a term for a video meeting.
In fact, it has caught on so well that Florida is getting ready to implement a change to its rules of procedure to encourage video court appearances in many instances when people are just providing an update or status.
Already, it’s common for lawyers to appear by video in some courtrooms (and I believe that @Procrustus has spoken of juries watching a trial via video chat).
I’ve had depositions where the court reporter appears via zoom. Imagine being a court reporter and never leaving your house. You can.
It used to be a joke that all “future tech” included video phones, yet then never caught on. Then COVID hits, and now they are a thing.
Speaking as a guy who’s been involved in wireless ethernet since the mid 90’s, you’re all welcome. And, I’m sorry. So, so sorry. If I had a chance to do it all again I’d be a recording engineer.
Hopefully this will get people off the roads a bit as well. This may help the environment.
What I also see is ‘micro management’ is being eliminated. This allows the capable to grow and move forward with out needing 3 meetings to decide to make a simple decision.
I can contact and work with others. The boss is being sort of eliminated. We do our jobs because we care.
I also think that this has done a lot to remove the glass ceiling. The department lead is a woman I trained years ago. That’s great. Neither of us want eithers job. We support each other as it should be.
I would suck at her job, and she would suck at mine. Works great.
Alphafold was pretty interesting. They can determine the 3D structure of proteins based on the amino acid sequence with around 90% accuracy now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Alphafold team wins a nobel prize for that achievement.
aren’t we approaching the end of Moore’s law due to how small transistors are getting though? I thought we were down to 2nm at this point.
I wonder if things like quantum computers, optical computers, etc. will replace IC and keep the growth in computing going.
My local hospital has recently installed what they call a “robot” surgery machine.
It’s not a robot of course, or not yet anyway. It allows the surgeon to sit in a chair and remotely manipulate the tools that are inside a patient, cutting and stitching etc.
That’s more than 20 years old.
You mean laparoscopic surgery? That’s 30 years old.
This may be the sort of thing @bob_2 was thinking of. As said, it’s a series of several robotic arms remotely operated by a surgeon on the other side of the room.
If so, the tech is a generation old. That company merged with a local to me Santa Barbara company called Computer Motion. I applied for a job with them in the mid 90s when they already had working models doing surgery.
As mentioned upthread, EVs are the most notable tech change for me. While many of the things that make up the current EV experience aren’t new per se, the overall packaging and usability leap that we’ve seen in the last 5 years is kind of amazing.
I own a Tesla Model Y and when I bought it was excited by the newness and some of the bells and whistles, but after a couple years of ownership I’m pretty amazed at how little compromise there is. I figured when I bought it, I’d be doing good by sacrificing some livability. However I’ve found the car to be a massive leap forward in almost every respect compared to an ICE car. You can never really have enough range, but getting back into an ICE car today feels like I’m pulling a horse and buggy out of the garage.
Now that the initial newness has worn off, I’m now far less impressed by Chat GPT. It can do some neat things, but even a little bit of scrutiny highlights how hilariously wrong it can be and how derivative it is. It might be useful for some really niche or rote use cases, but it’s not going to take over the world. Also, I’m pretty certain that the entire model was built by stealing content. It’s a derivative work and probably should be paying infinite royalty payments to all the copyright holders they plagiarized. I find Dall-E to be a bit more impressive and more fun to play with, but of course it too is based on IP violations.
If I can nominate a new tech which I’m LEAST impressed with, that would be USB-C. Holy crap…this piece of junk is the thing the EU is forcing everyone to adopt? Really?
While not new (tech was introduced in 1947) but new techniques implemented and leveraged over the last 15 years, which has provided the US to have the ability to be energy independent. Oil fracking. This has permitted the US to drastically alter our foreign policy making and depending on how you look at it, either eliminated leverage that other countries had over us or created leverage that we have over other countries.
… or on the other side of the country - or a different country … (a usage case that makes more sense 
)
yeah … I def. want my dumb Eriksson charger connection back … or some proprietary XYZ-connector where the maker could (over)charge you whatever they wanted for it (easily 10-20 times that of an USB-cable) …
IOW: I love the USB-C … cheap as chips, sufficienty fast, does what it is supposed to - flawlessly … and heck since they came out with those - I manage to plug it in “right the first time” - whats not to like?
Both the male and female ends are very fragile, it doesn’t seat securely when connected, it collects debris easily, and perhaps worst of all the same connector may or may not support any of a dozen different features based on the implementation. About the only thing it does well is being reversible, but that’s not exactly an innovation, just an improvement over it’s equally problematic predecessor.
I’m with you. What’s wrong with USB C? It’s better than every single common typical user connector I’ve used. I wish everything would standardize to USB-C.