Actually, economic progress hasn't been that enormous for hundreds of years. If my memory of economics class is correct, the economic progress was very slow and sporadic up until about the post-civil war period. Up to then, most progress was in military science. Fast clipper ships were about the greatest innovation. But on land, the speed of the horse was the maximum speed of civilization for several thousands of years.
It wasn't until the steam engine came into practical use that things broke loose from the limitations of the horse. Then came a flurry of major inventions -- the cotton gin, the train, the automobile, the aeroplane. That flurry of invention was pretty much done by the end of WW I. For the next 50 years or so it was mostly assimilating those inventions and incremental inventions, such as the electrification, and process inventions, such as the assembly line, hierarchial management, etc. Of course there continued to be inventions, but not the biggie leaps until we started to hit electronics, with the radio, TV, and their ilk. Then came the computer.
Sure, more stuff will come. But a lot of it will be incremental.
We've moved from the age of horse-based speed to vehicle-and-plane based speed. But that level of increment is unlikely to come again. Planes will get faster, of course, but only incrementally, not exponentially. Cars and trucks will probably not get a whole lot faster -- human reflexes can't take it, and the distances between population centers just doesn't make 500 mph roads practical or economically feasible to build and maintain. Even if we get a whole new technology, such as mag lev cars, again, you don't get the same productivy increase going from 100 mph to 500 mph as you did going from 5 mph to 70 mph. Farming is getting more efficient, but we're not likely to see another leap of the level we got going from the wooden horse drawn plow to the tractor with a gang plow, or from manure to chemical fertilizers, or from hand reaping to today's mechanical reapers.
I'm not one of those who think there's nothing left to be invented. But until we can re-invent humans, with whole different levels of physical capability, we aren't going to make the degree of progress of the last few technology spurts. |
