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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

This my emotional, biased opinion. But humanity has begun a fundamental shift in the way we live due to widespread, cheap access to digital technology and information via the internet. Whatever happened before the past 10 years of insane growth we have seen is completely relevant. The relics of a bygone era. People will say "yeah, everyone thinks this time is different". Except it is. We have never had anything even remotely as game changing as this before. For the first time in human history, absolutely no one can imagine what will come even 10 years from now.

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I know you addressed this, but this literally could have been written in 1999, and what's more, it was probably more accurate then.

Technology has continued to expand, but I'd say the last 20 years have been a continuation of growth that's been happening since the 90's. Not all that much is fundamentally different today than it was in the early 2000's. Yeah, we all have smart phones and social media, and those are certainly cool and important things, but not quite up to breathlessly heralding a new age of humanity like you're doing.

Actually I think innovation has totally stagnated the last 10 years or so.

Yup, we still have the same basic CRUD, except now phones are faster so more JavaScript to make it look pretty.

Wouldn't you say autonomous vehicles (2020-30), mass adoption of seeing robots for manufacturing and warehouse work (2020-2030), CRISPR-based gene drive to nearly eliminate disease-carrying mosquitoes and other organisms (2020-2030), embryonic germline-editing for human enhancement (2025-40), and possibly Artificial General Intelligence (2030-2050) cause changes as massive as or more so than the rise of the Internet?

Let's see when (and if) those materialize. Flying cars have been 15 years away for about 50 years now. And self-driving cars have already missed their initial target.

I would love for you to be right, and in general I believe that the history of the world can be summed up as "and then things got better". So, I will say this: if those things happen then yes, they will be at least as big as the internet.

>Whatever happened before the past 10 years of insane growth we have seen is completely relevant.

A delightfully accurate inadvertency!

while your opinion may be correct, note that this is in the context of a discussion about a valuation bubble. even if tech has taken us into a new world, stock prices are still rooted in the expectation of future profits. if you think the valuations are supported, you need to explain why this new reality is going to be more _profitable_ than the old reality.

>If you think the valuations are supported, you need to explain why this new reality is going to be more _profitable_ than the old reality.

In my mind it comes down to human capital. Until now only a tiny fraction of the global population has had the opportunity to contribute to science and technology in a meaningful way. Before the internet, if you were to have any chance of contributing to science it would require the hiring of expensive tutors, purchasing massive volumes of books, tuition at elite schools, etc. Yes, of course there have always been outliers, but that's not the point.

There is a very good reason why the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs made up until now have come from the minority of wealthy elites in the world, and it's not because they are smarter or harder working. It's because they had been given the tools to succeed. And in my opinion the democratization of these tools which has occurred over the last decade will lead to runaway economic growth spurred by technological advances we can't even imagine yet. Essentially a "singularity" argument without the need for A.I.

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