My friend Grant posed the following interesting question to me: <\/p>\n
\nSay you could go back in time to 1999… and you were to show\/tell something that shows how much “progress” humans have made in the past 10 years — something that would amaze somebody — what would it be?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
A great question, I think. Here are some answers we came up with, with a bit of justification for each: <\/p>\n
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- Wikipedia: launched in 2001, it now has 3.1 million articles in English and 14 million overall. The #1 information source on the web and a massive testament to user-generated content. (Remember Encarta?)\n
- Nexus One<\/a> (or any suitably advanced smartphone): The first gigahertz chip didn’t even come out until 2000<\/a>, and now you can get one in the palm of your hand — with near-universal connectivity and a beautiful touch-screen that nearly matches the 800×600 resolution of most common full-size monitors in 1999. It also comes with a built-in 5 megapixel camera to boot, and those babies weren’t even available to consumers until 2001<\/a>.\n
- Avatar: CGI on an obscene, marvelous scale. Art+technology.\n
- Obama: a black president so soon? Amazing.\n
- 32GB microSD card<\/a>: In 1999, the largest hard drive you could get was 37.5GB<\/a>. Now you can get 32GB in a format the size and weight of your fingernail — about .0005th of the volume and weight of that big old hard drive.\n
- YouTube: Only started in 2005, but already has over 100 million videos of all varieties and origins. People watch over 10 billion videos a month<\/a> — near 10 hours of video per user. All video will be streamed eventually, but it’s staggering how quickly the transition is happening.\n
- Usain Bolt’s 9.58 in the 100m: Maurice Greene makes things complicated here. He ran a 9.79 in 1999, but he’s since admitted to buying (but not using… hrm) PEDs. If we take him out of the equation, the 100m world record improved by 0.08s from 1989 to 1999<\/a>, from 9.92 to 9.84. From 1999 till now, Bolt has taken off a remarkable 0.26s. For a similar improvement from 1989, we’d have to go back to the mid 50s and the era of hand-timing. Even with Greene in the picture it’s an amazing feat.\n
- TiVo: pause, rewind, record TV. Seems like magic. (Actually came out in mid-1999, but I couldn’t resist. PVRs are so pervasive now.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Runners up: Newspapers going out of business<\/a> (drag timeline to the left), iPod (2001) + iTunes (7B songs sold), eInk\/Kindle, Google Street View<\/p>\n
Clearly, since we’re both computer nerds, this is a limited, biased selection. Which of these is best? What else is out there? Medicine, the arts, the sciences, sports, politics… <\/p>\n
Also: predictions for 2020?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My friend Grant posed the following interesting question to me: Say you could go back in time to 1999… and you were to show\/tell something that shows how much “progress” humans have made in the past 10 years — something … Continue reading