Dividing up life into eras

This is just one of my silly "cocktail party" trains of thought (I've never been to a cocktail party). In short, more blog fodder I just felt like typing up without much careful thought or revision. It's simply amusing to me to try and divide up life, and indeed society at large, into small-ish eras focused around technological change, each suspiciously around 10 years long, with myself suspiciously placed at the start of interesting things.

The same sort of thinking drives the urge to divide up people based on their birth years, though the periods that have achieved greater consensus don't match up on neat decade boundaries. (On that front, I'd self-identify as a 90s kid, or even Gen Y, but not a millennial, a group I see as different though the consensus groupings lump both together. A friend born in 1985 disagrees with my self-identification because I have no memory of the early 90s. In any case, there's what majority consensus says, and there's also what is popular online. I think it's trendy to think of there only being 2 groups: boomers and zoomers. The divide used to be anyone over 30 is a boomer but it's getting lower.)

Anyway, I'd classify the 90s as an era of peace (I'm an American) with growing technological change. A transition is underway, by the end almost everyone has a PC in the house when they did not at the beginning. Those of us growing up in that decade are in some senses special for being at ease with both sides of low tech and high tech, for being able to see and understand and comfortably live in multiple worlds. This is in contrast to older generations who are uncomfortable with all the modern technology (and stereotyped as not knowing how to operate a computer), but it's also in contrast to the younger generations who are uncomfortable without all the really modern technology that hides away the details (and again stereotyped as not knowing how to operate a computer). The older generations have trouble when competent usage requires operating at a higher level of abstraction, the younger generations have trouble when competent usage requires working beneath the levels of abstraction. Only (conveniently) my generation of those born approximately between 85 and 95 seem to comfortably bridge the gap. (There are of course outliers, which include many of the pioneers of the technology in the first place going back to some of those born in the 1920s.)

The 2000s was a decade of two things: lost innocence, confidence, ways of life, etc. etc. in the post-9/11 environment, and more digital connection as the internet really began to take over. Every business has a website, every person might even have a website (though it might just be a silly geocities thing, or even a personalized myspace page). Blogs were really popular. Email was standard, and we had good web mail too. Web applications in general started to become more of a thing. It was the age of AJAX.

The 2010s was a decade of true personal computers, but with a sadistic side of corporate "we know better than you" attitudes that try their hardest to make them not your computers after all. I refer of course to the smart phone age. Cell phones were there decades earlier, but it wasn't really until the smart phone that a new era could take over. Digital connection was accelerated, social media really began to have its day (even if older attempts were around before, and the displaced forums and so on were early signs). I got my first phone (a note 3) at the end of 2013.

The 2020s is in many ways the dumbest decade. Things are dumbed down, people are stupider, stupid events keep happening, stupid decisions are made more frequently... COVID was a big event kicking it off, but I think it will in retrospect not be as important as 9/11. The bigger event that has only been gaining more and more steam, much like smart phones in the 2010s, and PCs in the 90s, is AI. (Perhaps another sign of this being the dumbest decade is that the smartest intelligence by the end of it will be artificial.) At last, in 2026, after like 70 years (or 110 years) of trying and having only modest success, so many of the AI hard problems have been falling. Getting to smarter-than-human intelligence seems eerily closer now, whereas up until 2014 or so (if you were really paying attention -- 2016 if not paying too much attention -- 2020 with gpt 3 if you were really not paying attention) ASI looked as hard as ever, with the best predictions only being able to shrug and speculate that a key insight could come tomorrow or in 20 years. Well deep learning and things built on top like LLMs have proved to be a useful insight, as well as the other side of the debate of there just being sufficient hardware power cheaply available. These systems still don't look themselves to be capable of rising to ASI, but they sure do seem capable of accelerating the research in getting the remaining unknown insights to get the rest of the way.

And of course, the 2020s may be the last decade, because humanity probably won't be around very long after we create the first ASI. The progress on alignment research still looks grim.

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Posted on 2026-02-13 by Jach

Tags: fodder

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