It’s arrogant for any particular group of humans at any moment to think that they are the beginning, that what came before them was merely prelude. But the same type of hubris may attend the thought that we’ve exhausted all intellectual possibility, that we are at the end. I accept that output and incomes have stagnated in America for most of the last four decades and that transformational technologies are hard to come by, but I don’t think we’ve reached an endgame of ingenuity. From the recent Economist cover story about the seeming diminishing returns of human effort:

“To those fortunate enough to benefit from the best that the world has to offer, the fact that it offers no more can disappoint. As Mr [Peter] Thiel and his colleagues at the Founders Fund, a venture-capital company, put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.

The first thing to point out about this appeal to experience and expectation is that the science fiction of the mid-20th century, important as it may have been to people who became entrepreneurs or economists with a taste for the big picture, constituted neither serious technological forecasting nor a binding commitment. It was a celebration through extrapolation of then current progress in speed, power and distance. For cars read flying cars; for battlecruisers read space cruisers.

Technological progress does not require all technologies to move forward in lock step, merely that some important technologies are always moving forward. Passenger aeroplanes have not improved much over the past 40 years in terms of their speed. Computers have sped up immeasurably. Unless you can show that planes matter more, to stress the stasis over the progress is simply a matter of taste.”