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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

What if there's an upper limit on what can be created and what if we are mostly there. What if we never really progress much beyond where we are other than gradually getting faster, longer battery life, and more storage. Games and movies and TV shows are now mostly sequels and rehashed versions. A 2006 car vs a 2016... Basically the same.

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There were no self-driving cars in 2006, and electric cars seemed like a far off dream.

Moreover: We're talking about a decade here. It's not a very long time. For more than 99.9% of human history, you would expect one decade to be pretty much identical to the previous.

But you could make a pretty long list of the changes in life from each decade to the next since 1900, so at this point I think the onus is on the people who want to prove that the next decade will not be materially different from the current. I'd certainly bet on change, and probably accelerating change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 - Available to consumers (for lease, and they were recalled)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_%282005%... - Competitions of self-driving cars for over a decade

We really haven't taken the magical leaps some people believe we have. We just learned to market them better. :)

So since the "internet" existed in the 70's, nothing exciting happened in the 90's?

Dashboards in 2006 cars are much different than today. Today most cars have at least one pixel based LCD/LED, CD player, Aux, Bluetooth, USB, etc. My 07 car was the last in its series to not have those. It has only a CD player. In 1996 they had radio and maybe cassette. In 2026 cars will be self-driving and/or SaaSS.

Self replicating robots? We're not there on that one but it seems possible. Then you can have 10,000 of them build a Taj for you. That would be different.

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