Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s?

I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s

I wasn't alive in the late 60s but most things I spend all day doing were literally not possible for consumers until the 90s-aughts

This past week:

I smoked ribs for the first time in my life. Despite having 0 bbq experience and being a relatively new owner of a charcoal grill, I for free and on a whim tapped into the nearly infinite font of human knowledge available at my fingertips to learn about the 3-2-1 method of competition barbecue and made amazing hickory smoked ribs. Without the internet I wouldn't have even bothered, and acquiring that knowledge would have required a trip to a book store or a personal contact with a BBQ expert.

I gave a tour of my newly renovated home to my mother who lives in another state and is in quarantine, having recently tested positive for covid.

I navigated somewhere I've never been easily using a handheld GPS which can navigate any modality (ie, bus directions and train directions for us city folk)

I drove 70 minutes to another state for a small collectors sale in my niche hobby and found something to add to my collection. I wouldn't have known about the sale, or hell even adopted this hobby in the first place, if I didn't have an internet group with dozens of strangers in my city all interested in the same topic.

I made two sales of items in said niche hobby to other hobbyists in my city. Absolute strangers I've never met before. I listed the item in the weekly "deal or no deal" style thread, after striking a deal I sent my address, and when they said they were on the way I left the item on the doorstep for them.

I watched a significant amount of TV without a single commercial break and on my schedule. Not pay per view either.

I left a message for my downstairs neighbor that the contractors are scheduled to show up Monday to replace their basement windows. My neighbors were in another state and got the message anyways.

I continue to work a job with my boss who lives in a other state (and has been for years).

These are all examples of "massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency" In particular with respect to information, hence why this is called the information revolution.

Most of what you describe could've been accomplished with sufficiently advanced telegraphy, optical media, and mechanical transport. Untenably expensive, but doable with 19th century tech.

The idea of "timeshifting" TV has been around since at least the '60s, Jeannie paused live TV one time so they wouldn't miss the game. But yeah, there's been innovation in "TV," though I suspect you're actually talking about videos on the internet (as opposed to DTV), and most of the recent moves seem to be massively empowering rights holders over viewers by shifting permanent ownership of physical media to fleeting licenses and subscriptions with terms that could change tomorrow. And, with the removal of the Paramount Decrees and decline of feature films + cinemas, we seem to be heading back to the bad old days of a studio system.

Satellite-based navigation, first implemented with GPS between '73 and '93, is a good example of innovation, and real advancement, after the late '60s though.

> Most of what you describe could've been accomplished with sufficiently advanced telegraphy, optical media, and mechanical transport. Untenably expensive, but doable with 19th century tech.

But it wasn't, which is the whole point

There's no reason to think telegraphs, physical media, and mechanical transport wouldn't have continued to scale and improve, merging in typewriters, punch cards (following Jacquard and Hollerith), CRTs, etc. As well as, say, high quality, "pro-sumer" sewing machines, machining tools, woodworking tools, etc. You know, the means of production.

Instead, analog technologies were strategically deprecated and phased out in favor of more easily surveillable digital alternatives, under the guise of "efficiency," in terms of energy and performance. Once a central network was put in place, innovation outside the network, in what we used to call the "real world," mostly stopped. It's all been fancier and fancier network protocols, applications, and appliances.

Everything is "smart," but under someone else's control. And the means of production are more centralized than ever.

We went from thousands of transistors in chip in 1970 to billions of transistors in chip in 2020.

Exactly. Transistors were invented in 1947, Engelbart presented on downscaling ICs to an audience including Moore in 1960, and he observed his law in 1965.

It's mostly held, transistors have incrementally increased as predicted over 50 years ago. This is consistent with Stephenson's observation that there's been no meaningful innovation since the late '60s.

This is like arguing in 1870 that there had been no meaningful invention since the Newcomen engine in 1712, just as the transcontinental railroad connected the nation.

I'm specifically arguing that there has been little meaningful innovation between the late 1960s and 2020s. Outside internet protocols, applications, and appliances, what's been invented since the late 1960s?

Between 1712 and 1870, interchangeable parts, bifocals, lightning rods, cotton gins, spinning jennys, carbonated water, thermometers, guillotines, parachutes, hot air balloons, sandwiches, mayonnaise, gas turbines, internal combustion engines, matches, electric batteries, microphones, typewriters, sewing machines, barbed wire, reflecting telescopes, stethoscopes, gyroscopes, mechanical reapers, corn planters, bicycles, telegraphs, postage stamps, photography, staplers, airships, gliders, light bulbs, traffic lights, Portland cement, the Bessemer process, and tin cans were invented. Watt's steam engine was an iteration, a few incremental improvements over Newcomen's design.

And then most of the inventions that shape contemporary life came between 1870 and 1970.

> Outside internet protocols, applications, and appliances, what's been invented since the late 1960s?

Do digital innovations not count as innovations? By that definition of course the digital revolution has not produced any meaningful innovation

Naturally, the industrial revolution has innovations that were related to industry while the information revolution has had innovations that are related to information.

Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions (if any)

Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the past, would make that tradeoff and go back

P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying problems

> Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions

That's certainly how this outline played out for the industrial revolution. The ending isn't written yet for the information revolution, but I do hope for the same.