- The idea that Apple, Amazon, and Google entering into healthcare would be taking healthcare services "away from centralized gatekeepers." What?
- Two lines about Climate Change in the whole post, and the 2nd is "We’ll remember this as the decade of unfortunate procrastination." That's quite the understatement.
- "We’ve also had more equal access to the good parts of economic growth." This needs explanation. Who is "we"? What are the "good parts" and the "bad parts" of growth?
- "Everything has gone from centralized to distributed." No, not everything. In many important ways the opposite has happened. eg. corporate conglomeration.
as another poster put it, perhaps disintermediation would be a better word to describe it. Individuals now have power to do things that they didn't before, or for much cheaper. Can see this happening in healthcare once 'big tech' is involved. It will be good for healthcare costs at least in the United States.
any suggestions to improve it? or do you think the decade will be remembered for totally different things?
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google like this. (Microsoft also does.)
The illusion of decentralization given by "you don't need a publisher, you need Amazon" and "you don't need marketing, you need a Facebook page" is one of their most successful creations. We haven't gone decentralized. We've given even more power into singular technology monopolies and eliminated many of the intermediaries that gave us actual choice of who to ask for publishing and how to market our products.
Now it's "sell it on Amazon"/"market it on Facebook" or you just don't exist at all.
You can publish books without having to worry about publishing and distribution - if you go through the publication-and-distribution vertically integrated monolith.
Publishing without going through the publishing monopoly is substantially harder though.
So we need more of the same old FAANG guys to 'fix' this? Do we really want our health data to be controlled in the hands of these FAANG companies because they are able to disrupt anything they touch? I hope not.
> What should we take away from the 2010 decade?
2010s: Was the discovery of democratising access to anything by 'programming an app for that' with collecting user data from a tool called a smartphone, which brought in a surge of unprofitable app / web companies IPOing everywhere and crazy tech companies raising ridiculous funding rounds with huge losses with little to no profit. I cannot see this continuing on into the 2020s. So my so-called 'machine learning crystal ball' forecasts something else.
2020s: Will have a tech crash due to this hyperactivity of these startups which many of them will shutdown. The transportation market will start to shift to carbon neutral alternatives over fossil-fuel based solutions in the late 2020s. AR will beat VR to consumer mainstream and will overlay our daily lives with wearables. Cryptocurrency becomes a financial alternative in the mid-2020s. Privacy will be more controversial and questioned by many users as we keep giving it away to be collected by FAANG companies and we start to have information which can be easily faked making it easy to spread disinformation, ie. mainstream fake news.
Now if you excuse me, I'm going to buy this cryptocurrency dip and to prepare my tinfoil rucksack and to continue to buy multiple newspapers from the local shop across the street. Hopefully that should be my new-decade's resolution.
Then we should stop deliberately giving it to them? E.g. in the name of privacy, Google has secured health data access for its own machine learning systems , to the exclusion of everyone else who is working on health ML. Laws like HIPPA were meant to facilitate the anonymous sharing of health data, not to block it. Health feels like a hugely lost opportunity exactly because nobody wants to touch that data with the current legal repercusions.
In hindsight, a lot of people might claim they saw it coming, but a lot of the things I see today are things I would have never predicted the "future" to be like, and were never things I ever heard anyone predict prior to the events happening. Seriously, all these amazon boxes everywhere? ... how many people saw that coming? For sure none of the real estate developers who poured millions into building all those shopping malls now lifeless like the coral reef on a warm 2019 summer day.
As for whats to come in the 2020's? clearly - flying cars, jet-packs, laser guns, self cleaning rooms, holograms, shiny pants, and robot servants. /s
All things you listed were founded in the previous decade, and indeed nothing in tech of this decade would be shocking to someone in 2009.
Based on this I expect the next decade will also see very little innovation.
In 2008 it all felt new or at least new-ish. In 2008 I did not have a YouTube addiction or kicked off a Facebook addiction. Those things started happening at the beginning of this decade.
People are beginning to have more well-defined opinions about these big companies. I have non-techy friends who left FB, for example.
We saw it start to take hold about halfway through this decade and I wonder if the trend will continue.
By not participating. Reading books. Enjoying time together at a park. Finding mirth in games and late night conversations.
By teaching them to pick up their own groceries, shop local, use the library, see local performances, and enjoying our neighbourhood.
If 2010’s were all about staying in and binging on Netflix I hope the next decade will be about getting out and letting our computers gather dust.
"Where a home just has one of these [AI / connected home]. Like an in-sink trash disposal, or an answering machine."
Consider phones. In the early 2000's, most people had a cell phone. By 2010, most people have a smart phone. These devices are much more capable than their predecessors. I've read books (Hans Rosling, Factfulness) that suggested communities with access to smartphones have a 3% GDP increase over communities with cell phones. That number may seem small, but remember it's a global scale. 3% is a significant amount.
The current state of AI is where cell phones were 20 years ago. We may get to a point where not using AI (as you said, "not participating") may put yourself at a clear disadvantage - you will not be as capable as your peers.
It's sort of like those 50-60 year olds in the workforce who refuse to use a computer. They've always done their job a particular way, but they are not as productive as some of the younger hires who use computers. Then they are shocked when they are laid off - their current (disadvantaged) output is far below what is expected, since technology has become ubiquitous and people expect you to be able to use a computer to do your job.
As for books and libraries: when libraries are upgraded these days, or new ones are built, the new buildings focus heavily on providing people with connectivity and games, with books relegated to an afterthought that you have to request from closed stacks (i.e. you have to already know what you want and patiently wait for it to arrive). I don’t envy any parent trying to bring their children up with 20th-century notions of reading.
Previous decade-by-decade changes from the 50s to the 60s to the 70s to the 80s to the 90s were, it must be admitted, mostly aesthetic rather than being the “fundamental changes in society” that people like to pretend — people in general didn’t become greedier in 1980 and less greedy again in 1990. But there were huge changes in the aesthetics of everything — clothes, interiors, graphic design, music, cars etc.
What has changed since 2004, in the actual physical world?
In terms of physical space, technology has become much more pervasive. I’m 2004 did you see everyone in a bar/cafe day reading a device? Internet dating was for losers and now Tinder is huge.
There have been fashion changes. Boot cut jeans came and went. Malls aren’t as popular as they once were. Victoria’s Secret Fashion show isn’t a thing anymore. We’ve begun doing away with the image of the skinny, magazine model as solely defining “beauty”.
If you compare even something like vehicles from 2004, there’s certainly a shift in aesthetic. More recent models have a more aggressive look.
But maybe your point had something to do with changes in behaviors. The younger generations aren’t consuming the same kinds of products as their parents.
To me the 00s is the "war decade" and the 2010s the "financial crisis decade", despite the defining events being in 2001 and 2008 respectively. Post-2015 is the "chaos decade", where politics stopped attempting to make sense.
A sock hopper in the 70s would look out of place and like lazy and out of touch writers. Now a teenage fan of Nirvana or 80s metal is normal essentially.
In comparison wit music tastes it is like a bunch of time travelers into the same high school for a bunch of anchronistic cliques together.
As for music and even film - maybe they re going through a long winter? Youtube travelogues are more interesting , to me. I think gaming , and virtual socializing has lots of unexplored potential too.
I m not even sure if someone is studying this seemingly quiet cultural period. I think we need someone to record this zeitgeist . Who are the eminent intellectuals that will be remembered in 2 decades?
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-...
Did he just miss 1.7 billion people?
(I may be projecting, as I'm often guilty of this especially w.r.t global geography)
Far more likely is that you've stored those card details and your Amazon account was compromised, internally or externally.
I don't use it that way either.
The 2010s is the current decade in the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 2010, and will end on 31 December 2019.
Daily usage differs from that definition of course, but that's not the point.
Take that is not over yet, the 2010's will end in over a year from now, so still plenty things to happen inside this particular decade.