# A Time of Wonders Today is Christmas Eve, which puts us in that liminal few weeks of the holiday season that serve as useful time for reflection. Work slows down, we pass through the darkest days of the year, friends and family visit for the holidays, and the calendars turn over to the new year. This year, I’ve been feeling gratitude for the sheer abundance of living in a technologically advanced society. Civilization has been producing marvels at a shockingly consistent pace. Without veering into saccharine appreciation, it's worth reflecting on these. In the style of Dynomight’s [“Underrated reasons to be thankful”](https://dynomight.net/thanks/) and Gwern’s [“My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s”](https://gwern.net/improvement), here are some things that are top of mind to be grateful for at the end of 2025: - **Accurate Timekeeping**. Timekeeping was an infamously hard problem for centuries, requiring a massive investment in [engineering]() to get right. Today, you can buy a $5 digital quartz watch from a dollar store that will be more accurate than the most accurate timepiece that a King could commission in the 1700s. Your phone is also an incredibly accurate time keeper. Society has enabled free access to clocks with atomic precision via [time.gov](https://time.gov/). - **Airpods**. The fact that high quality audio production devices -- with excellent noise cancelling capabilities -- can fit in such a small form factor, that their battery life is more than adequate, and that they “just work” across all my Apple devices still amazes me. - The quality of **machine generated text-to-speech** has dramatically increased over the past decade. Many of the “podcasts” I listen to now are TTS of articles or papers. TTS used to be unlistenable. Now it’s essentially at the level of a mid-tier human narrator. A skilled human narrator can still surpass the quality of TTS, but at that point it becomes an aesthetic preference and not a functional one. This opens a huge catalog of “reading” to me that I otherwise wouldn’t have time to consume. - **Spotify**, and other streaming services, offer a [mind boggling amount of consumer surplus](/blog/2025/12/19/My-Favorite-Music-of-2025/). For a reasonable monthly fee, I can access nearly all recorded music in existence. Spotify’s playlist suggestions have also been valuable in discovering new music. These have also qualitatively improved over the past decade, to the point where the machine-generated playlists seem to capture a great sense of what I actually enjoy. - **Real-time translation and OCR** have gotten way better over the past several years. Machine translation is pretty close to a solved problem, as are many other traditional NLP tasks. OCR has taken a huge leap forward with new models like [Gemini 3 Pro](https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-3-pro-vision/). On a personal note, I’ve been able to scan handwritten letters from previous generations, written in a language I cannot speak and in handwriting I can barely interpret, and bring those letters back to life. - Today’s **LLMs** feel like science fiction. LLMs are one of the best tools ever invented for learning, and are increasingly becoming the best tool ever invented for programming. They’re also fascinating quasi-intelligences that you can interact with for shockingly little money. - **Single day delivery**. The convenience of being able to summon any of millions of consumer goods to your doorstep within 24 hours is still a piece of societal magic. The labor and environmental externalities to this are real. Yet, it remains a dramatic increase in convenience from any previous time in human history. - **Air travel is an accessible commodity.** A middle class person can buy a plane ticket and reach most places on the planet within a day or two of travel, with better safety statistics than cars. This is remarkable, if you stop to think about it. At any given moment, there are something like 10,000 planes in the air, flying millions of miles per day. 150 years ago, there were zero airplanes in existence. I could expand this list further: - The proliferation of amazing compact digital cameras in smartphones - The ability to semantically search across all your photos, GPS navigation - The availability of effectively free video calls to anywhere on the planet - Accurate weather forecasts - [Autonomous taxis](https://waymo.com/) - Contactless payments (and the many, many pieces of financial infrastructure that make this possible) - The incredible wealth of open source software society has accumulated - The incredible wealth of [open source knowledge](https://www.wikipedia.org/) that humanity has curated - [Satellite internet connectivity](https://starlink.com/) - ...and so on. We live in an era where the ambient level of technological capability is so high that much of it has faded into the background. As one such example: most of the promise of the early internet _has_ actually come to pass -- information _is_ readily accessible, individuals _can_ publish and spread new ideas, communities _can_ form online and blossom into in-person communities that stay connected asynchronously through the internet. Prior to the internet, there were dozens of similar precondition revolutions which got us to the point of even being able to conceive of such a hyperobject. None of this makes the remaining hard problems go away. Aside from the fact that these marvels are not globally distributed, there are, of course, many very real geopolitical, social, economic, and meaning-making problems we still face. In this darkest week of the year, I think it’s worth reflecting on what has been accomplished. Hard problems are often tractable.