Has the Rate of Technical Progress Slowed?

Amiga Trombone writes "An article in the IEEE Spectrum argues that the rate of technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years. While there have been advances in areas such as computers, communications and medicine, etc., the author points out that these advances have largely been incremental rather than revolutionary. He contrasts the progress made within the life-span of his grandmother (1880-1960) with that in his own (1956-present). Having been born the year after the author, I've noticed this, too. While certainly we've produced some useful refinements, little of the technology available today would have surprised me much had I been able to encounter it in 1969. While some of it has been implemented in surprising ways, the technology itself had largely been anticipated."

Comments

Re:Flying Car

[CarpetShark]

An airplane can use climb or dive quickly, or bank, and that's pretty much it. And none of those operations can really be done on a dime.

You're flying in the wrong mode. Switch to arcade.

Re:Twenty-first century arrives after slight delay

[paiute]

It turns out that the Galactic Brotherhood is here to get compensation for our theft of their IP. Seems that SETI@home wasn't recording noise but the encoded libraries of several thousand civilizations, and we at home were processing a lot of copyrighted material. With damages and interest, we owe them everything from the center of the Sun out to about Saturn. And we get disconnected from the electromagnetic spectrum.