Things humanity has started doing in the last 10 years

The advancement of science and technology, the processes of change and innovation, the change of actors in the economy or the reformulation of different scientific disciplines; progressively lead us to a new type of society. Where working conditions, leisure or information transmission mechanisms, for example, take new forms. All these revolutions propose the vital change of individuals and need a new approach, noting that all this momentum that brings new technologies, does not leave us behind, and do not let a moment pass from what is coming. If in the last 10 years we have changed not only physically, but everything around us. We can’t just sit back and watch our lives go by and do nothing about it.

As early as the third decade of this century, we can show how technology has changed the way we interact with our environment and the world at large. For the past ten years, technology has transformed everything it has touched, like king Midas that everything it touched turned to gold. The Internet of Things, AI, Augmented Reality, Web 2.0, the new materials used in technological devices. Everything has been transformed, to the form of consumption and mobility has influenced our habits and customs.

Inanimate objects, more present than ever

It is already common to see people talking alone everywhere, staring at their smartphones, talking to them as if they were people with which you have a conversation, recording stories for some social network, or recording an audio to send it by Whatsapp. All this we can see in our environment as if nothing, but 10 years ago we would not have seen it coming. For example for those Instagram dates, did not exist.

Thanks to the advances of natural language, today users communicate in a very unique way. The use of mobile devices is understood because you are interacting with another caller on the other side of the line, but who answers when you talk to an inanimate device, who is Siri, or when you ask questions to the Echo of Amazon. All of this is possible to natural language processing, data analysis and artificial intelligence, which has developed exponentially in recent years. Some expect that, “soon, voice assistants will be more important than smartphones”.

Climate Change and Technology

For a few years, the scientific guild has been warning about the consequences of our lifestyle, with strong evidence in hand. Many did not believe in them, but the evidence we refer to is the devastating effects that have begun to be seen especially in the last 10 years. Weather-related records are beating at an alarming rate: the last four years have been the hottest since there are records. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change are already a reality for the world’s population, technology plays a very important role within this issue. Thanks to advances, we can predict storms and alert people for their timely shelter, things we didn’t have 10 years ago and many lives were lost because they didn’t have a reliable alarm system.

Environmental problems play an increasingly important role in international policy and information systems that continue to develop to deal with or at least mitigate the damage that nature is beginning to inflict on us.

Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion. By the end of this decade, the commercial application of this technology will still be far away (we will probably have to wait until the middle of the century to witness the construction of the first commercial nuclear fusion reactors), but further away it was still 10 years ago, when nuclear fusion technology was something that could not even be imagined. Rather it was very tight about the consequences already experienced by the manipulation of radioactive materials. Today there is hope with the nuclear fusion reactor being built Cadarache (France), which should be able to successfully confine and stabilize plasma. And this milestone will represent an immense leap could solve our energy problems and needs and that will help us to definitively end the emission of greenhouse gases.

Pay with your cell phone

10 years have passed and mobile devices could only do one thing at a time. But the change came with the iPhone 4 and with its innovative multitasking technology. The idea of linking them to our bank accounts and using them as credit cards was unthinkable. The digital transformation of banks and the emergence of specialized technologies has made it possible for us to access our money, make transfers, use it as credit cards, all this through mobile devices using the Internet as a means of connecting to the virtual world.

Measure your beats while jogging

Technological advancement, not only has developed in the devices that make life easier for us, but also in those that take care of our health. With the fashion of a healthy life sponsored by gyms, has arrived a whole range of health devices oriented to the continuous monitoring of those who do sport. The pulsations, the burnt fats, the stairs climbed, the steps taken. These are some of the devices that have the ability to quantify a set of variables related to physical activity and give us a more precise idea of how and how much we move. Something that 10 years ago, we could only know if we went to the doctor to get a checkup.

The next decade

One of the technologies that have sounded the most in recent times is the Internet of Things, household devices that have the ability to connect to the Internet. The speeds reached these days by the 5G mobile networks, exceed by great advantage their predecessor and that will be developed during this decade and of course with new devices adapted to this trend.

Autonomy is what we will see in the coming years, devices capable of moving alone like driverless vehicles, Uber works prototypes that promise great feats.

Sensors are already everywhere, on roads, elevators, shops, at the entrances of buildings. In fact, there are already some that have been implanted in the human body, in the coming years, many of us, we will have one implanted with personal data, such as health, direction, profession, etc.

The total disappearance of the physical supports. We may see how in some sectors such as music and film, the daily use of physical media is going to disappear. The speed of the networks and the power of the home playback devices will multiply until we can use TVs and music equipment completely without all kinds of physical media.