I once asked my mom, who grew up in the 1930s (aside: feels increasingly necessary to specific 19--), what was the biggest technological change she had seen in her lifetime. Her immediate answer was 'indoor plumbing.' But her next answer was the cellphone. She said cars and trains weren't vastly different from when she was a kid, she almost never went on a plane, and that people spent a lot of time watching the TV and listening to the radio, but they used their cellphones more and for far more things.

My grandmother was born at home in 1917. Her father had to hitch up the wagon to go to town to fetch the doctor, and she had been born by the time they arrived. She felt it wasn't any particular innovation that was meaningful so much as the velocity of change. She lived to be nearly 100, so had gone from that horse-driven subsistence farm life to watching people land on the moon and the eventual digitalization of the world. She commented many times that she had a hard time believing that the same rate of change would occur in the next 100 years after she was gone. I've often wondered what that would look like - you'd almost need colonies on Mars to top what the last 100 years have been like in terms of changes. I suspect that the complete reengineering of our world away from fossil fuels may be that level of disruption and change.

I don’t know really, I was a kid in the 90’s.

This is a bit far from the economic aspect, but the world currently seemed to be utterly suffused with a looming sense of dread, I think because we have, or know other people have, news notifications in their pockets telling us all about how bad things are.

I don’t remember that feeling from the 90’s, but then, I was a kid. And of course before that there was the constant fear of nuclear annihilation, which we’ve only recently brought back really. Maybe growing up in the end of history warped my perspective, haha.

People who experienced a stable childhood seem to have a natural tendency to view the period they grew up in as, if not a golden age, then a safer, simpler time. Which makes sense: You’re too young to be aware of much of the complexity of the world, and your parents provide most of your essential needs and shield you from a lot of bad stuff.

That’s not to say all eras are the same. Clearly there’s better and worse times to be alive, but it’s hard to be objective about our childhoods.

That's certainly all true, and not just parents shielding you from bad stuff, but the bad stuff just not appearing on the TV or in the newspaper the way it will today on TV or internet. If it was going on then nobody was aware of it, and maybe not a bad thing. Is my life really better for reading about some teenage cartel hitman making human "stew" etc ?

But I do think that perhaps the 70's was a somewhat more decent time than today. Lines have been crossed and levels of violence normalized that it seems really didn't exist back then, or certainly were not as widespread. e.g. I grew up with the IRA constantly in the news - often bombings in the UK as well as violence in Northern Ireland. But, by today's standard the IRA's terrorism was almost quaint and gentlemanly ... they'd plant a bomb, but then call it into the police and/or media so that people could be evacuated - they still created terror/disruption which realistically probably did help them achieve their goals, but without the level of ultra violence and complete disregard for human life that we see today, such as ISIS beheadings posted on FaceBook or Twitter that some people happily watch and forward to their friends, or the 9/11 attack which was really inconceivable beforehand.

People have been killing each other for their entire history, I don't think that has changed. It's just that you hear about and see it more often now.

I was a teenager in the 90s in a house that read the Daily Mail every day, and that could deliver a similar sense of dread.

But at least the dread was about things that seemed vaguely tractable and somewhat local, rather than the dizzyingly complex, global and existential threats the news delivers these days.

And of course not everyone read newspapers as intentionally-alarming as the Mail. Whereas now many more people’s information supply is mediated by channels with that brief.

Feels to me like a double-whammy of the alarm-maximising sections of the internet developing at the same time as the climate crisis becomes more imminent, maybe?

Yes - internet "news" is hardly a positive.

I grew up in the UK, so news was mainly from the BBC which was pretty decent although bad news (e.g. IRA bombings) was still front and center. US TV news doesn't even pretend/try to be unbiased and is all about shock value, reinforcing their viewers political beliefs and of course advertizing (which the BBC didn't have, being state funded).

Internet takes bad news and misinformation to a whole new and massively distorted level.

I gave up watching TV many years ago (nowadays primarily YouTube & Netflix for entertainment), and mostly just skim headlines (e.g. Google news) to get an idea of what's going on.

For me, it's incredibly different. I moved to the US from Spain back when the best internet we could get at home was 3kb/sec, and we liked it (yes kids, close to a million times slower than today). I recall the massive cultural and economic detachment of that move: Minimal shared culture. Major differences in food availability: Often I couldn't even cook what I wanted if I didn't smuggle the ingredients. Connecting with people with shared interests was really difficult, as discovering communities was a lot of work: Even more so in America, where I needed a car for everything, and communities lacked the local gossiping infrastructure that I relied on at home.

Today, I got to do some miniature painting while hanging out on video with someone in England. I get to buy books digitally the same day they are published, and I don't have to travel a suitcase full of them, plus a cd collection for a 1 month vacation. My son can talk to his grandma, on video, whenever he likes: Too cheap to meter. Food? I can find an importer that already has what I want most of the time, and if not, i can get anything shipped, from anywhere. A boardgame from germany, along with some cookies? Trivial. Spanish TV, including soccer games, which before were impossible. My hometown's newspaper, along with one from Madrid, and a few international ones.

An immigrant in the 90s basically left their culture behind with no recourse. Today I can be American, and a Spaniard, at the same time with minimal loss of context by being away. All while working on a product used by hundreds of millions of people, every day, with a team that spans 16 timezones, yet manages to have standups.

A lot of people's lives haven't changed that much, because their day to day is still very local. If you work at the oil field, and then go to the local high school to watch your kid's game on friday night, and all your family is local, a big part of your life wouldn't have been so different in the 90s, or even in the 60s. But I look at the things my family did week that I couldn't have possibly done in 98, and it's most of my life. My dad's brain would have melted if he could hear a description of the things I get to do today that were just sci-fi when he died. It's just that the future involved fewer people wielding katanas in the metaverse than our teenage selves might have liked.

> does the world really FEEL that different now, than pre-internet?

Yes. You said it yourself: you used to have to WALK somewhere to look things up. Added convenience isn't the only side affect; that walk wasn't instantaneous. During the intervening time, you were stimulated in other ways on your trek. You saw, smelled, and heard things and people you wouldn't have otherwise. You may have tried different routes and learned more about your surroundings.

I imagine you, like I, grew up outside, sometimes with friends from a street or two over, that small distance itself requiring some exploration and learning. Running in fresh air, falling down and getting hurt, brushing it off because there was still more woods/quarry/whatever to see, sneaking, imagining what might lie behind the next hill/building; all of that mattered. The minutae people are immersed in today is vastly different in societies where constant internet access is available than it was before, and the people themselves are very different for it. My experience with current teens and very young adults indicates they're plenty bright and capable (30-somethings seem mostly like us older folks, IMO), but many lack the ability or desire to focus long enough to obtain real understanding of context and the details supporting it to really EXPERIENCE things meaningfully.

Admittedly anecdotal example: Explaining to someone why the blue-ish dot that forms in the center of the screen in the final scene of Breaking Bad is meaningful, after watching the series together, is very disheartening. Extrapolation and understanding through collation of subtle details seems to be losing ground to black and white binaries easily digested in minutes without further inquiry as to historical context for those options.

I abhor broad generalizations, and parenting plays a large part in this, but I see a concerning detachment among whatever we're calling post-millenials, and that's a major, real world difference coming after consecutive generations of increasing engagement and activism confronting the real problems we face.

It's because the change happened slowly. So it feels like nothing has changed.

Another thing that's changed is engineering. The US has moved up the stack. Engineering is now mostly software development and within that it's mostly web development. Engineering and manufacturing has largely moved overseas to Asia and that's where most of the expertise lies. The only thing off the top of my head that the US still dominates in engineering is software/aerospace/defense. In general though everything else is dominated by Asia, if you want the top hardware technology the US is no longer the place to get it. In Silicon Valley there used to be a good mix of different types of engineers, now everyone is SWE, and most likely doing web stuff. But here's the thing, you most likely wouldn't have noticed this unless you thought hard about it because either you're too young or because the change happened so slowly.

The same will be for AGI if it comes into fruition. A lot of jobs will be replaced, slowly. Then when AGI replacement reaches saturation most people will be used to the status quo whether it's better or worse. It will seem like nothing has changed.

I don't think so. AGI will fundamentally change things. People will marry AGIs or at least try to (watch Her). Any and all digital jobs will be first to be replaced, and then most other jobs too via robotic arms or full androids. SDVs will reach their full potential, likely disrupting the entire automotive industry. Our economy will get even more messed up...

I would say that it feels different because the internet / smartphones are more about giving everyone access to inexpensive, high bandwidth, communication (nearly) everywhere. But high bandwidth communications have been available everywhere for a long time, if you had a need and were willing to pay for it --- tv news would bounce signals off a satelite for on scene reports, etc.

It does feel different, but I don't think it's the bandwidth, or even the availability. A newspaper is high bandwidth and fairly inexpensive and ubiquitous but also fairly high latency. The evening TV news was only once a day until the 80s. One big change I noticed was 24-hour news. Suddenly, it felt important to know about things immediately. The web was different because it was interactive--both in the sense that you could swiftly switch between information sources and then in the social media sense that everybody could participate, even if participation meant flame wars.

And historically, TV news isn't that old, especially the 24-hour variety. The Apollo landings and Vietnam War are often cited as landmarks in TV news, where for the first time large numbers of people watched things as they occurred. But it's only about 25 years from those events to Netscape Navigator, where the web became widely available (at least in the developed world). That's a long time in most people's lives, but I wouldn't be surprised if future historians will see TV as something like an early, one-way Internet.

Considering that I work in open source robotics I literally couldn’t do my job without the internet. So that feels pretty different!