The thing with technological progress is that it’s hard to predict it’s direction. People in the 50′s were expecting space travel and flying cars, not www, wikipedia, geonome sequencing, World of Warcraft and iPhones. And yet, now that we have them, we do consider them significant technological progress. So perhaps the next things that will come up will be equally unexpected but equally useful. It’s hard to measure speed when the thing you’re measuring changes form every few years.
The thing with technological progress is that it’s hard to predict it’s direction. People in the 50′s were expecting space travel and flying cars, not www, wikipedia, geonome sequencing, World of Warcraft and iPhones. And yet, now that we have them, we do consider them significant technological progress. So perhaps the next things that will come up will be equally unexpected but equally useful. It’s hard to measure speed when the thing you’re measuring changes form every few years.
Some people were, but not all. Buckminster Fuller was writing about the trend towards information proccessing before 1940: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherealization