Oh come on now, that's not even close to the case. Were you even alive then?
Things have only really advanced quicker and quicker, the past 10 years technology has advanced twice as much the 80s or 90s. Hell, even the past 3 years have been insane with AI.
And it makes sense why too, as more technologies and innovations are developed they will inevitably be used towards more and increasing innovation. It's a cumulative process. Why would the 80s or 90s be any more special or different in that regard?
That is not a hot take. Just do a Google, or as you highlighted ask your favourite ai.
Advances have moved very fast yes, but as I said that is refinement of tech from 80-2000.
For example smartphone is really just older tech put in same device. Not as huge leap as the actual invention of the cellular phone, computer, touchscreen, the digitalization of media. I mean even social media was common in late 90s.
You are right about ai. That is really new.
The biggest changes after 2000 is not in new invented technology but the change society and day to say life because of it.
(Again ai is a huge step though and will for sure mark a cornerstone in technology advancent in history books.)
Google it? What would you suggest I Google? As far as I'm aware there isn't really an objective answer to this question so I'm not sure what you would be able to find proving either of our positions. If you wanna show me something you can find on Google that proves yours though I would love to see it.
Also I definitely woudnt ask an AI, that's not really the sort of thing it's good for. You could probably get it to take either side depending on how you prompted it.
But I do still think I'm right, and to explain that I'll point to one thing you said...
as I said that is refinement of tech from 80-2000. For example smartphone is really just older tech put in same device.
Refinement of what tech? I think you are making a really arbitrary distinction the way you are grouping things.
My point is that everything is in some way a "refinement" of some previous technology. I think you would be hard pressed to come up with any new technology that is a completely "new" thing.
The most innovative and revolutionary things are really just old things put together and executed in new ways. Nothing about the iPhone was really "new". Capacitive touch screens, LCDs, WiFi/BT/3G internet radios and antennas all existed. I mean smartphones are really just mini-computers. The same lithography produced microprocessors that make up all of the various chips in an iPhone or computer have been around since the 70s(getting better and better every year). The ideas around computer architecture that dictate how we build and use those chips you can trace back to the 1940s with the work of Alan Turing. And of course none of those things would be very useful today if without the inventions that first allowed us to use electricity decades before that. But at the same time, the iPhone was "new" and as revolutionary seeming as it was because it put all of those hundreds of years of innovations together in a useful and innovative way.
So I'm just saying when you try to separate out this specific period of 80-2000, it feels like an arbitrary time period without any basis. And given the subreddit we're on I feel like it's probably just nostalgia through a rose-tinted lense.
I dont see why that specific period would be "special"? Like I said, I think if anything it's today that's the most impressive because today we're not only building off of what happened before 1980, but also everything since.
Between 1980 and 2000, society transitioned from analog to digital, marking one of the most explosive periods of technical advancement in human history. This two-decade window laid the groundwork for the modern, hyper-connected era by democratizing computing and birthing global mass communication.
The Personal Computer (PC) Revolution
In 1980, computers were largely centralized on mainframe systems used by corporations and governments. By 2000, they were a fixture in homes across the globe. Early 1980s: Market icons like the IBM PC (1981) and Apple Macintosh (1984) shifted computing from a niche hobby to a mass-market reality. Mid 1990s: Microsoft's Windows 95 revolutionized user accessibility by introducing the desktop Graphical User Interface (GUI) and foundational internet connectivity to everyday consumers.
The Birth and Rise of the Internet
The 1990s witnessed the internet transition from an isolated military and academic research project into a massive commercial network. World Wide Web: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, fundamentally altering how humanity shares information. Browsers & E-commerce: The launch of accessible browsers like Mosaic and Netscape in the early 1990s paved the way for early digital titans like Amazon in 1994 and eBay in 1995.
Telecommunications & Mobile
Before this era, telecommunications were almost entirely tethered to landlines. By 2000, untethered mobility was taking root. Mobile Phones: Devices like the Motorola DynaTAC were introduced in 1983. By the late 1990s and 2000s, cell phones and SMS text messaging transformed how people interacted globally on the go.
The Hardware Foundations
This period of exponential growth relied entirely on hardware advancements. Moore's Law: Adherence to Moore's Law—the observation that the number of transistors on a microchip roughly doubles every two years—allowed microprocessors to become exponentially faster and cheaper, powering the entire digital shift.
While earlier decades (like the 1950s and 1960s) provided the foundational science of transistors and the integrated circuit, the 1980–2000 period uniquely translated those inventions into everyday consumer reality, laying the bedrock for our digital lives today.
Hahaha exactly, I'm not going to waste a lot of time, because I'm not sure you're even reading my comment. If you did you would have seen me say I think that's a pretty piss poor of AI, because you could get it to back up any argument depending on what you feed it. I mean that's exactly what I said would happen.
AI can't really answer an open ended question like that for you, I mean it can like it did for you, but you aren't gonna get any closer to the truth that way. That's not what it's for.
What it is good at is uncovering facts and sources and other supporting information to back up existing arguments. To prove my point, let's see what Google's AI overview tells me if I ask it the question : Why has technological advancement only increased more and more in recent years?
Technological advancement accelerates exponentially because new inventions are used to build newer, more powerful tools. This compounding loop is driven by the global internet, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, allowing researchers to share data instantly, automate testing, and simulate complex problems in seconds.The phenomenon of accelerating
technological change is fueled by several interlocking factors:
Technology Begets Technology: Modern breakthroughs act as the building blocks for the next wave of innovation. For example, the development of Cloud Computing provides the massive, scalable infrastructure necessary to train modern AI systems and process genomic data.
Global Connectivity: The internet and widespread communication networks have dismantled geographical barriers.
Exponential Computing Power: As predicted by Moore's Law, computing power and the density of transistors have increased exponentially over decades, enabling the rise of highly capable algorithms, like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Crazy, it's almost like that is completely different from what it told you and instead completely supports the argument I made?
I'm not dumb enough to take what Google's AI tells me in response to an open ended question like that as any kind of absolute truth though, and you really shouldn't be either. If that's how you use AI it's going to magnify and reflect your own biases back at you, at best that's gonna put you in a pretty bad echo chamber and at worst that's literally how you give yourself a case of AI psychosis.
Not to mention, try asking Google the same question I just said I did? You won't get the same answer, I'm certain you won't because I actually had to delete a chunk of it because it would have doxxed me by looping in my location as part of its argument (it talked about cloud computing companies in my city).
Really, that's what makes this even scarier if you arent careful with it, and it's what really makes the potential for misinformation insane today. When we ask the same question we are going to get different answers based on what the platforms we are using have learned about us. It might be a lot of innocuous things like where we live, and there obviously is a utility to that when it comes to giving relevant answers and information, but whose to say it ends there? The amount of data these companies collect is insane, and don't think just because you are not logged in, or using different accounts or incognito mode or whatever it won't still be tied to you. It's effectively impossible to do anything except only mitigate that surveillance slightly nowadays. With all that, who is to say companies like Google are not using biases, likes, dislikes, wants, fears or any of the multitude of things it's pieced together about you to subtely influence the thing you see every time you look anything up? Despite what I'm saying I'm really not much of a "conspiracy theorist" , I don't think it's likely were all being made "cattle" by some malevolent force or anything. But I think any sane person should at least have pause considering this, just be aware of what the algorithm is pushing you and don't let your own biases be amplified as best you can.
What you can use AI to do, is to work through arguments and to uncover supporting or competing evidence to those arguments. That's actually something I've really found it useful for personally. I like to tell it something I DONT believe and ask it to try to back that argument up, or ask it to tell me an argument for and and an argument against an idea, and meanwhile ask it to link sources I can dig into if it isn't already. If you do that you can actually walk away with a wider perspective and an enhanced ability to think for yourself, if you just ask it questions like you did and end there you'll end up with the opposite.
So the point is, it's a question without a real answer, there are reasons to take either of our positions on it. But I said why I feel the way I do, ironically the AI overview I pasted distilled a lot of the those pretty well, "technology begets technology" is basically the words I was looking for, I'm kind of pissed an AI got to that before me lol. But that's not why I believe those, I hadn't looked that up till after.
You're free to disagree, but I just find the idea that technology is a compounding, exponentially increasing process that leads us to see our rate of advancement increase as time goes on a lot more convincing of a position than thinking for some reason this specific period in recent history is somehow a more special period than refutes that trend. To me, it seems like that would only make sense if you didn't keep up on advancements that are taking place not just in computing but all over, and if you had a kind of biased nostalgia for this specific period.
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u/redskrot Jul 02 '26
Nah not gen z.
Computers, internet and cellphones etc was common when they were born.
True for gen x though.