Probably not in the top 10 the more you think about it.
Those are innovations, not achievements. They happened largely by small groups in parallel around the world, with some small improvements shared between people when they met over hundreds or thousands of years. They're amazing things, but they're all examples of slow, incremental developments.
The internet is a truly global communications network that works ubiquitously everywhere that's been in development for less than 50 years. Humans have never achieved as much to do something so useful in such a short time ever before.
If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.
Isn’t this just a byproduct of the technology it is based on?
Commercial routes such as the Silk Road could be considered as the first massive, interconnected information networks.
Further, access to the internet surely has spread the world faster than any other tech. Which in my mind highlights just how important and powerful the tech has proven to be.
So invention of soap and hygene doubled life expectancy.
The industrial revolution / steam engine has taken us from 1% gdp frowth per ccenturyt o 3-5% GDP growth, so over 100x improvement.
Those are historic changes. What important metric has the internet increased at least by 50%?
Freedom indexes showing things like research and expression exploded with the internet.
I'd suggest these things are _far_ more important for humanity than growing a countries GDP, which may or may not result in life improvements for the majority of its citizens.
I would also nit-pick and entirely reject that hygiene doubled our life expectancy. Worldwide LE went from 30 to 60 over the course of many decades and no single region saw a double in less than a few decades. So this can't be attributed to any single event, much less something as discrete as soap/hygiene.
It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet. Also, your numbers are way off [1], as the current percentage is around 10%, down from 36% in 1990.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/d...
> It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet.
what do you suggest happened 30-40 years ago that triggered this massive spread of wealth, then?
It doesn't really matter what I suggest. Correlation does not imply causation.
But for instance, in China there were 700 million of people living in extreme poverty in 1990, and that number went down to 200 million in 2008, and 7 million in 2016 [1]. Regardless, internet penetration rate in China was 23% in 2008, and 53% in 2016 [2].
From the article in [1], it is easy to deduce that most advancements in extreme poverty eradication come from similar contexts, countries with larger populations that have experienced accelerated growth in the past decades, mostly because of manufacture and exports, e.g. India, Vietnam, or Brazil.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/56213271
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236963/penetration-rate-...
Look at GDP or poverty rate of any country, there is no 'bump' or infection point the year or even the decade internet was invented. You know what did create a bump? Decolonisation.
Conclusion: nothing happened, extreme poverty was receding for decades prior, and it's just the same trend continuing.
If I kept going I suspect by the end of the day internet might not even make the top 100.
I'm not arguing that people work less, I'm saying humanity now has more "free" time to produce technology/innovate. In regards to the west, the lower classes do not get the benefits of this - but the upper class or researchers absolutely do get the benefit of not having to hunt and gather for food.
Plenty of ways to interpret that sentence more charitably. How about "we" meaning "we the people of our time."
With the internet, people can be hunter gatherers and spread all over the world and still pool their knowledge to maintain the infrastructure. You still need electricity and machines, but the internet links it all together.
*edit: changed web to internet, along dgellow's comment