Glad I’m not the only one who noticed this as a millennial. Back in the 80s, 90s, and up until around the mid 2000s, technology seemed to make major leaps and bounds into the future every two years. Things were constantly evolving; but ever since HDTV/gaming and Android/iOS hit the scene, it’s like tech stopped evolving and started iterating instead.
I mean I can’t even imagine what it was like being a kid as Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z; they’ve been playing Minecraft, Fortnite, and Rocket League for their entire childhoods! Meanwhile I saw the evolution from 8-bit to 16-bit to 3D to HD, to 4K HDR with Ray Tracing! Every 3-4 months I was playing the newest hot game! The only exception from my childhood was Counter-Strike, and even then, there’s been several CS titles released over the years.
Technology seems to have practically stopped evolving. It’s mind blowing when you think about it. I wonder when we’ll finally hit the limits of die shrinking and enter a technology dark age…?
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Well, it was marketed to you, but never promised. In any case, you were born at the tail end of the massive boom from about mid-19th to about now.
It’s ending. Can you figure out why? Hint #1: it’s not Russia, China, Iran, or even Israel.
PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
It’s the laws of physics. Dennard scaling is dead, unless someone discovers new, even smaller atoms and a way of disabling quantum tunnelling.
It’s also the fact that faster speeds are unnecessary and nobody wants to pay more for them, so electronics companies have focused on efficiency/reducing power draw instead (which, incidentally, let’s you run your computer faster anyway).
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 6 days ago
I get it. I really do. But that’s not the point. It is the endless enshittification of everything that I am most concerned with. Stagnation in general I can deal with, but having everything be a more effective spy tool is something else.
Like take smart phones for example. My first real smart phone I got in 2015. You could say I actually got one in 2013, but for some reason that phone could not connect to the internet easily, so it was mostly just a phone with some nice apps I could install and also be an MP3/MP4 player. But while performance wise the phones I had since 2020 have been much better than those I still dont feel the slightest difference… and since I rarely receive real calls anymore I can probably get away with just leaving my phone at home most of the time which is probably for the best given it is effectively a anklemonitor most of the time. I can take my older 2013 phone that no longer works for telemetry if I want music and I can wear a wristwatch (a Casio ripoff, no joke. Those haven’t changed in 30+ years) to tell the time.
I can navigate in the old school way of just looking up before hand where I want to go and memorize it or write it down and pay attention to road signs.
tetris11@feddit.uk 5 days ago
I think the implication though is that the enshittification is a byproduct of a vampire economy, a.k.a one where there are no new ideas. That could be driven by hitting a technological wall, forcing companies to turn on each other and their customers.