What was the last truly innovative thing you witnessed?
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Gene Editting with CRISPR and other techniques. Eventually this will be truly personalized medicine at an affordable fee.
Fusion with more power output than input will become a game changer. Currently we have done fusion but the energy to do the demonstration was in total more than the output
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The Internet has changed almost every aspect of daily life, I don't see why you don't think it is as innovative as the invention of the car.
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Life is vastly different than in the 80s. You can literally know anything you want right now, simply by asking an artificially intelligent handheld computer that has access to every discovery known to man. We're on the cusp of being able to cure almost any disease and live forever. We can blow the planet up 10x over and still have ammo left. Scientists can see so far away that they can almost see the beginning of time. Nothing your great grandfather saw in his life will compare to what you will see in yours, have already seen.
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I'm a software guy, so I'm gonna go with 'free compilers.' Back when every company was keeping their secret sauce close to their chest, RMS turned around and released gcc fro free. That was... new, to say the least. It paved the way for much of the software you see eating the world today.
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Montana is banning those. Expect a nationwide ban to come soon.
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I understand your question wanting to know about New big shit. But if you say all inventions in medince in thre past decades is "just" a little improvenenrt of existing medicine but not Innovation, then your examples oft cars and airplanes are no invention but just a littleimprovemenrt of mobility. Bikes and trains existed before wie Bad nobility it just got faster.
Ill think the Problem why medicine and science Innovation in General is not perceived as thatdramatifc is because you need to be a scientist (vor really read yourself Into it) to understand. The incredible steps forward wie make are so complex it cannot be explained to the General public anymore.
You See the big obvious stuff (Gravitation, electricity) wie know now. You cannot write a PhD thesis anymore discovering electricity or evolution. Nowadays PhD thesis are about inventing nanoparticless in a way they only go to a very specific tissue type (cancerous) to destroy it there locally. Anymore Detail Into this requirees extensive research. But its still super innovative.
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Naaa.
Na na na na na na na, na naa naa na na na
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Couldn't agree more. I put a 128GB card into my action camera last night, then remembered that my first computer had a 170MB hard drive. That's close to a thousand times more storage, and according to t'internet, it's physically more than two thousand times smaller
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I agree. I suspect the internet will retrospectively eventually even be looked at as an "information revolution" on par with the industrial one. I know that sounds like an enormous claim but there is a long road yet, so I don't think it will turn out to sound so crazy. Each revolution (and its increase in power) comes along with responsibilities and potential dark sides, though. I think similarly to how the industrial revolution opened the door to industrial war, we are already seeing the pain brought by various (distributed, automated) information war techniques. I love how we live in an age now where a person with internet access and enough tenacity can eventually learn almost anything, and contribute back, but at the same time I worry deeply about the rolling waves of belligerence, disinformation & selective amnesia coercion, gatekeeping, and fraud that have come with it. I hope humanity can get those under some degree of control soon.
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The internet had niche use for enthusiast nerds. An internet connected handheld device was the game changer.
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As unpopular as this may be, LLMs (aka. "AI" like ChatGPT).
I don't think we've seen something that'll change the world as much as I think it will since the Internet was introduced. It will change the way we interact with computers. For a lot of people, it already has.
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It doesn't seem like you're understanding what I'm saying much at all.
By your definition everything is innovative
Maybe that in of itself is the problem here, equating the words innovative and invention.
Try replacing innovative with groundbreaking or original perhaps
But saying that advent of aviation and automobiles is just bikes and trains with wings or more wheels kinda goes to prove a lack of arguing in good faith here
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dick sucking robot
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I think that is downplaying it, while mobile devices caused the major boom in access, the Internet was already prolific before
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that was eventually for the worse though, because of the megacorps who control it now.
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I do not mean that automobiles are not Innovation. I just wanted to underline that your view on medicine Innovation being just a further evolution of already existing medicine and is therefore not Innovation or original sounds in my (scientist) ears exactly as if one would claim cars are nothing new because we had bycicles with wheels already.
Of course cars and planes are big Innovations. But so is New medinice (and also other sciences). Completely New concepts. Its just very hard to grasp if you havent studied it.
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I have a 512GB card in my steam deck, seen listings for them upwards of 2 TB, reliability scares me a bit with that much data but still, it's impressive how far flash memory has come. I remember being excited about a 64MB thumbdrive and buying my first 1GB one.
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Well, I disagree with the premise.
But perhaps one of the more obvious physical examples are Blue and White LEDs (1992). Small gadgets used to always have red LEDs, maybe green ones, or an unlit 7 segment display, everything else was too expensive or too energy consuming for battery powered devices. And not only that, RGB Diodes also saw the end of pretty much all cathode-ray tubes.
You see kids, back in the olden days before white LEDs, the only way to get blue light was to throw high energy electron ray on a phosphor coating. So anything blue or white before the 90s was made with that technology, from car radios to TV screens.
I'd personally also keep an eye out what the cheap electric motor will do next. From "hoverboards", civilian drones, e-scooters and the modern e-bike, it's only a matter of time before the new use case will emerge.
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I'm a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there's been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I've been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!
I'm not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there's lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they're boron grades but I can't recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it's processed. It's allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.
Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there's aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.
Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.
It's oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don't need to do things like plan around liquid batching.
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3d printer
