Biggest innovation in my mind is the concept behind KickStarter. Literally revolutionizing marketing, fundraising, and the product development process.

I think that everything you directly mentioned is incremental improvements over the last decades (electric cards, SSDs, 3d printing, tissue printing, DNA/RNA microarrays, 3d motion detection, RaspberryPI and Arduino [which are more mass production and extra firmware plays than anything], etc).

However the io9 link's contents are the f-ing future and they didn't even scratch the surface. Our understanding of biology is getting better and better, automation is finally starting to get wide acceptance both in industry and academia, and there is so much work being done by universities today that was pure science fiction only a decade ago.

The future is sneaking up on us quietly, and once it's here, there's no going back :)

I think that understating current era achievements is some sort of cognitive bias. Quite probably it even has a fancy name that I don't know of.

For example, recently one my friend argued that there haven't been too many inventions in the latest quarter of the 20th century and beyond (compared to first three quarters of the 1900s). It took me some time to explain it that having the internet, self-driving cars and computerized prosthetics is fucking amazing. Also, the clip of Louis CK ("Everything is amazing and nobody's happy" [1]) helped :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnzZZw84v0

ADD: found the term! Rosy retrospection!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

The future doesn't happen overnight; everything is an incremental improvement ;) SSDs are designed as a drop-in-replacement for spinning hard disks. i.e. they work in systems designed for spinning hard disks. Systems adapted to how they work takes time.

things which are "the f-ing future" aren't on the mass market yet. When they finally are, you could say with some justification that "this is just an incremental improvement of the real breakthrough of 2012" ;)

Out of all those things you listed, self-driving cars and maybe - just maybe - 3D printing are the only truly exciting things, at least in terms of their potential to be disruptive.

I think consumer robotics is a massive market that needs a breakout in. I can easily see people throwing away life savings, a double mortgage, and their cars to get a personal butler droid that cooked, cleaned, did dishes, mowed lans, etc. Maybe even more importantly, the wealthy elite class would throw millions away to replace servant crews. It doesn't need to be one machine, it doesn't need to look human, you could probably control it with your phone rather than finicky voice recognition. I think the technology is already there, nobody just took the initiative.

Sorry for the me-too comment.

It is apparent to me that if you had the shekels to throw in a certain direction 3D printing would be one direction. It seems to be hitting that inflection point.

Self-directed tuition is the other: Khan Academy, Coursera et al., cheap scalable global education. Total game changer. When has this happened before? Never.

Geesh, only two major paradigm-shifts emerging in one year. How tedious!

Neither of those are from 2012.

I think the argument is that they've been getting into the mainstream this year...

I think the year that a new paradigm-shifting technology is first conceived and then developed, and then implemented on any scale within a single year will be a time to celebrate the end of humanity and the peak of the singularity!... (if it ever happens)

I like what has happened with internet radio. But opposite of boring is exciting. I still couldn't get myself excited with the present though.

One thing that's fun to do when the present loses appeal is to envision the future. Write out in a journal page what a day in your envisioned future is like.

Yeah. http://io9.com/5971328/the-most-futuristic-predictions-that-...