only The difference between the year 2000 and the year 2022 is extraordinary. I'm not sure you can really round to the nearest thousand

It is crazy how many people basically saying, "Nothing extraordinary has happened in the past twenty years or so. Not like X year compared to Y year." or "Take someone from twenty years ago and life would be basically the same." Maybe it's because so many here lived it, but the world has changed. Considerably.

The very fact that profound advances have become mundane is extraordinary. Change, advancement, innovation, and progress has become so commonplace, it has become invisible unless something truly astounding comes along.

Go back to 2000, and you have a world without social media (and all the issues that come with it). MySpace was launched 2003, with Facebook 2004. 2006 for Twitter. Those have fundamentally altered society and how information is consumed, for good and ill.

Streaming. We have completely altered how we consume media. Music, movies, TV shows. So much entertainment is available for far cheaper than ever before.

YouTube wasn't a thing until 2005. That alone has revolutionized the world. Beyond the sharing of videos and content created, the ability to get visual guides to so many things is astounding. Video tutorials have made picking up new skills easier than ever. Learning in general has completely changed. Khan Academy, Skill Share, Brilliant, etc. You can learn just about anything in a dozen different ways. Students can use photo math to solve complex math problems in seconds.

Phones. The iPhone completely upended the mobile phone market. Smartphones have become ubiquitous and are the primary way many people around the world connect to the internet. All the infrastructure that supports the mobile industry is astounding, from paying per text message of yesteryear to unlimited 5G data plans.

GPS. I still remember having to print out Map Quest directions. Then, you needed expensive specialized units. Now everyone with a smartphone has access to GPS directions. Going beyond that, you can get traffic alerts, accident reroutes, speed trap information, etc.

Tablets and E-readers. For a book lover like me, the amount of books I have access to is astounding. It's like walking around with an entry library in your bag. You can watch movies on them, surf the web, work, etc.

Medical technology. CRISPER, mRNA vaccines, new procedures like laparoscopic surgery, mapping the human genome, etc.

Solar and wind technology, as well as developments in battery technology. Yeah, batteries aren't "there" yet in terms of where we want them, but they have been improving. Solar and wind technologies have made incredible leaps and bounds over the past twenty years.

SpaceX is landing rockets. Reusable rockets. We just launched one of the most sophisticated piece of engineering in the form of the James Webb Space Telescope recently that lets us look farther and clearer than ever before. We just launched one of the most powerful rockets ever built (SLS) with another, even more powerful, one getting ready (starship). We are going back to the Moon soon with plans to stay there. Space tourism is a thing now.

These are just some big things off the top of my head. Little things have also changed, yet we don't notice them despite completely changing how we operate. Self checkouts. How we tap or insert credit cards instead of swiping (or just using our phone to pay). Online shopping. Curbside pickup. Ride share like Uber/Lyft and other gig economy things like food delivery. Not memorizing phone numbers since they are in contacts. Having a camera and video recorder in our pockets, ready to go at a moments notice. Bigger, better TVs are cheaper than ever. Cloud... everything; from saving photos to word processing, so much stuff is seamlessly integrated between phone, laptop, tablet, and computer. Online dating. Spell check and grammar help. Podcasts. How texting and messaging overtook phone calls as the primary form of communication. Look at how advanced cars have gotten, backup cams, blind spot detection, smart keys, electric vehicles, etc.

If we stop and look around today, we can see so many things on the horizon that have the potential to change the world, yet are nothing more than headlines to skim over because, ultimately, they are one of dozens of 'marvels' happening in the same period of time.

Fusion got a big bit of news recently. People joke about how it is always "thirty years away" but progress is being made. ITER is planned to be finished in 2025, which may be huge as well.

Machine learning has exploded in the past year or so. AI has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, but now it is starting to become visible. AI art and the new chatbot has been making waves recently, and the rate of improvement is astounding. People laugh now at some of the goofs it makes, but it's only going to get better as the technology matures.

3D printing is another one. It's around now of course, but the things it can do is only going to grow as time passes.

Medicine is constantly improving too. New drugs and procedures make a world of difference to many that is largely ignored or invisible to the people who it doesn't affect.

So much more, but I think I've made my point.

To all those who say the world hasn't changed or nothing "extraordinary" has happened in the past twenty years really drives home how extraordinary this time in human history is. Revolutionary, society shifting technology that would dominate the public attention back in the 20th century has become so normalized, they are nothing more than a headline you scroll past and maybe think, "Huh. That's cool."

Edit: Based on some of the comments, I do want to add that that nature of technology means we don't know how the inventions of today will affect the world of tomorrow. Someone in 2080 could be talking about how GPT and machine learning revolutionized humanity the same way we talk about railroads of the past changing things today. Some mundane discovery today could be the foundation for some wonder tech of tomorrow.

The point is, good and bad, the world has changed and will continue to. We have double the human population since the 1970s. More people, more education, more tools, and more rabbit holes to go down to explore. We have problems, just like every point in human history has had problems, but I am trying to make an effort to be more positive about the trajectory of human progress.

if any natural humans still exist, humans will be seen as primitive oddities if they are noticed at all

I am well aware that AI will produce things that we don't even have the ability to imagine yet. I still don't know how to write a 5 year plan about it.

Imagine someone in the 1800s saying "Electricity is going to transform the world and no one is paying attention" mainly because even if they could understand the light bulb, there was no context for contemplating the telephone, television, microchips and generators.

It's hard to see what's possible when it's so outlandish from today's perspective. Imagine someone in 1922 predicting what we have today, it's beyond crazy: everyone has a device that is connected to most other humans, they can see and talk to them in real time, know where they are and where they want to go. to go making your device access to a satellite system around the world.

And with AGI we can have an exponential acceleration of inventions, so everything could go very fast (if we don't destroy our habitat first). Impossible to know if things take a minute or a decade.

That is, AGI could develop machines that will develop machines that build everything we need most efficiently and transport it to where it needs to be, create ways to grow food in laboratories much faster than we think now, which could mean no more. animals or other agriculture. . It could develop not only everything we ever dreamed of in medicine overnight, but also create something that makes sleep necessary. So we can eat, sleep and work totally differently in a very short time, which is about 95% of our existence. I could create artificial wombs, so there goes that. A newly developed type of "clothing" could make houses unnecessary because our temperature can be controlled by "clothing" at all times, meaning there is no need for traditional housing. Everything we take for granted as the basics of our existence, like the bed you sleep in, the shower you take,

But maybe the legislation will slow it down to the point where nothing really happens.

We can try to predict 2030, but by no means does anyone know what the world will be like in 2050 and beyond. After the singularity, it is simply impossible to imagine what technologies will exist because many of them will be created by an entity far more intelligent than any human being