No, it hasn't been slowing. The author fails to see that we know more about astronomy in the last 2 years than the previous 10. More has been discovered about the brain in the last ~15 years than people knew in the last 100,000 years. Throw in chemistry, nanoscale fabrication, materials science, etc. At every level of society we have been impacted by the advancements that are occurring around us daily. People who have spent their entire lives thinking linearly have a hard time getting a sense of how much things have changed.
That increase in knowledge has been mainly quantatative, not qualatative. Sure, we know know exactly which stars are in quadrant x27b or where dopaminergic neurons connect in the limbic system. But that doesn't solve practical problems that improve people's lives, the way telephones and electricity did.
Quick: Name one practical, day to day benefit of the Human Genome Project...
People like my grandmother who were adopted, and thus didn't know their family history, can now get a genetic analysis done to see if they are more likely to get breast cancer, or any of a host of other ailments. Can't get much more practical and day to day than "am I going to get cancer."
This is a fair response- Though I would point out that none of the companies that do this (including 23andme.com, the one getting all the news) don't do full DNA sequencing and instead use techniques to find genetic markers that predate the human genome project.
Not day to day, but I can send a vial of spit off to a company which will then tell me if I have any genes which increase risk for certain illnesses. I can then take preventative measure.
For an old timey medical thing, which is really what you should be comparing your medical knowledge stuff to, not electricity, what is a practical, day to day, benefit of antibiotics? (I would argue the curing your sickness is a special occasion benefit, even less day to day than preventative measures taken from the genome thing).
Your point on antibiotics is a fair retort to my argument- Though if I had to choose between knowing a human's full DNA sequence or posessing antibiotics, clearly the latter is by far the superior item.
DNA forensics uses technology that predates the human genome project. There are some minor (but significant) benefits to "DNA analysis" as a larger category.
My point is that the Human Genome Project was sold as an exponential-style technology that would revolutionize disease research within a couple of years- But now it's been completed for a long time already and the benefits have been slight (Though I still wholeheartedly support the project despite this- Minor improvements are valuable, too)
That's incremental, not revolutionary. DNA research may eventually give rise to a revolutionary breakthrough but it will still not herald the coming of 'the singularity', and that was what this article was about.
It sort of does, by denying that "changing everyday life" is the relevant metric.
If we're going to measure progress, first we need to agree on a metric. Different metrics will produce different results. But a quick perusal of some alternative metrics:
* How much more do we understand about the world now than we did, and how much of this knowledge is used by engineers in technology?
* How many more bits (from an information theoretic standpoint) does it take to describe our technology? (Probably my favorite, as it most directly captures what I think most people are getting at. Not perfect, though, as it's not true that more bits > less bits... however, that's a decent first approximation given the scale involved.)
Given the wide variety of other far more useful metrics, "how much has my everyday life changed" should be rather far down on the list of metrics you want to use. By most useful metrics, technology progress has indeed accelerated and continues to accelerate. That we have a bit of an intermediate area here where we're putting together the necessary bits to really open up the throttle again shouldn't be that surprising; robotics, nanotechnology, and biological technology are not easy things... but we're getting there, one bit at a time. And those things will further open up other secondary effects, like private space travel being both practical and useful (for resource extraction). I don't think it's unreasonable that we'll get at least one good energy breakthrough either, probably either an alternative fusion technology or practical satellite solar power of some sort (though that may be 15 or 20 years off, the technology necessary is a fairly simple extrapolation of existing trends, not requiring any magic).
Enjoy this moment of apparent quiet, where all the action is on the Internet. There's perhaps 10 more years of it, then things are going to be exciting again. (And it's not a hard transition, so you may still not notice it unless you look for it. But it's already happening, just slowly.)
The point that we are must deal with multiple metrics is crucial.
However, the metric of how everyday life has changed is one important metric.
One part of this, however, is that one doesn't know at what point a technology will become disruptive to either daily life or to another technological area.
Computers made great progress from 1950-1980 without really impacting daily life directly. They also made great progress from 1980-2009 and vastly impacted daily life.
Biological progress has been pitifull in comparison to the complexity of the human body and in comparison to the progress of information systems. But information systems have the ability to produce tools which in and of themselves create vast progress even as biological understanding otherwise continues make it merely incremental progress.
In 1909 the Model T was already in mass production. I think that represents a huge shift in day-to-day life that happened between 1900 and 1950 but not 1909 and 1959.
On the other end of the timeline, I think Google going from a $25 million funding round in 1999 to a $100+ billion market cap in 2009 represents major changes in how society works.
