What was the last truly innovative thing you witnessed?
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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
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The first time I tried steering-assist on a car felt like a significant transition.
Even though it was a simple "stay in lane"feature, feeling the car moving the wheel took a bit of getting used to.
I know that there are lots of other replies about the Internet and phones, but I've always liked maps so as a specific example that's an area that has transformed astoundingly. I have a map in my pocket that can show me anywhere in the world, give me directions, monitor traffic levels, show aerial photographs and street-level photographs of many areas of the world. I can fly around a 3D view of a city's buildings, and even see where my family members are.
Oh, and you can buy vacuum cleaners that don't need bags, now.
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Don't use them tꝏ often , specially not enough to know how gꝏd they truly are . But if want basic info about some thing , don't like sifting thru pages and pages of search engine garbage . LLMs I used automate that process and consolidate the info into something fairly easy to understand
Peops hate LLMs bcus they supposedly "turn peops brain to mush" , but … what if my brain's ALREADY mush ? Think this's one instance LLMs might help more than hinder , so shouldn't be discarded entirely
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I’d say the iPhone. A truly innovative, smart phone. When it first came out, I mean.
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After reading the comments here, I see the problem: You judge past things by what they have become, and new things by what they are. Nothing will ever be "truly innovative" by those standards.
The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage. The airplane was a pass time for the ultra rich, while anyone else got by with hot air balloons if they wanted to fly. The soviets got to space first by pointing a ballistic missile upwards.
We have CRISPR and can alter the Genes of any living organism to match our needs, but oh well, it's only used by labs right now and anyone else got by perfectly fine by selective breeding.
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If you remember navigating with a compass and map, GPS is goddamned magical.
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... The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage...
100%. To add:
Automobile was actually slower than the horse for good many decades. -
If you think that the internet is revolutionary, what right do you have to claim that automobile ever was?
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"Um, yeah, but we could have already known everything thousands of years ago if we had just made any effort. AI is just a worse version of what evolution already made between my ears. We could have already blown the planet up 70 years ago. The beginning of time is sooooo 13.8 billion years ago, YAWN!" - OP probably
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The internet was well established before the mobile web really took off. It looked different (most of us would say better), but it was already a mature part of everyday life. The dot-com “bubble” around Y2K predates the iPhone by years.
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Just not paying attention. We advancing too quickly imo. Not mature enough as a species to control this kinda stuff
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The first information revolution, is somewhat equivalent. With the invention of the printing press, distribution of information became an order of magnitude cheaper.
Literal months of work to produce a single copy, became a few hours to setup the movable type, then produce as many copies as you want.
Daily gazettes became a thing that was possible to do.
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Are you familiar with the differences between traditional vaccines and mRNA vaccines in terms of production?
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If the innovation is the airplane then it doesn't matter if it's an old timey biplane or or a next generation stealth fighter
If the the innovation is the vaccine then it doesn't matter if it's a smallpox vaccine or an mRNA vaccine
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But that's an arbitrary distinction. You could also argue, "what's the difference between a vaccine and medicine?" Or "what's the difference between medicine and physical medical treatment?" mRNA vaccines involve more innovation and impact than bloodletting via leeches.
But I won't respond to that line of thought anymore because you didn't answer my question.
You can choose to answer my question or just not reply. Do you know what the differences are between traditional vaccines and mRNA vaccines?
