Why has change in society slowed?

If you focus on a narrow band of technology as you do above, you'll get sudden jumps followed by more stable levels of development. And the perception of the importance of the jumps is not always only to do with the technological level itself but also with marketing, availability, affordability, media interest etc. Location is also a factor. So, you say the 1990s were filled with technological advancement, but all you seem to mean is that in Western countries the internet and email became widely available then. And then from 2000 to 2010 we had the invention of a couple of very successful consumer gadgets, the smartphone and tablets. Highly impactful but not so wide a range of tech, and underlying processor technology continues to follow Moore's law anyway. Also, moving away from the internet and computerized gadgets, did you notice any major advances in air travel, rocket technology or cars from 1990 to 2010? Certainly not much compared to 1940-1960. And since 2010, we've had mass-produced electric cars (Tesla) and successful private rocket launches (SpaceX) in those areas just to focus on what Elon Musk has been doing. Then we can talk about biotechnology, environmental technologies and so on, and again the picture might not look so bleak for this decade. All that's only to say that perceived overall technological advancement doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with actual technological advancement.

Over domestication of people.

Reply to Time Self driving cars were science fiction a decade ago. Now they are killing people.

Check out Rifkin’s the third industrial revolution documentary for an overview of the comprehensive change, based on an internet of things and a sharing economy, that is possibly happening.

Reply to Time I think you are quite right that the rate of new groundbreaking technological developments is slowing down. The major developments of technical development which we see today reflect the progress of the previous century of research and development. Over a century of development produced yet another product in the Smartphone, introduced around 10 years ago. Old fashioned computers, telephones, and radios had to be developed and perfected first.

It takes at least 50 years for a new technology (like radio, or like computers) to be fully developed, exploited, and superseded. The potential of railroads, the internal combustion engine, electrical motors, the jet engine, radio, transistors and integrated circuits, and numerous other technologies has been pretty much realized. That means that major new developments in those technologies may not occur. The perfected technology will just be continued in use into the future, unless something much better comes along.

Researchers are now looking at quantum computing to find a way to transcend the limits of silicon.

It may seem like a given decade of your life (fairly young? just guessing) presents a lot of change. New apps are available frequently; new versions of smartphones are offered regularly; new snacks appear in the Worthless Foods aisle of your local supermarket. But look, some of these changes are significant,and some of them are of no significance whatsoever. Hundreds of millions people--billions?-- drinking water out of plastic bottles is a very recent development which is nothing by the success of marketing. The industrialized world NEVER needed to put water in plastic bottles.

The 19th century saw tremendous change: Photography and telegraph were introduced before 1850--168 years ago. The age of instant communication over distances arrived before Abraham Lincoln was President. Railroads were introduced around 1830 to 1840. Edison invented sound recording in 1878. The first electric generating station was built in 1882. The telephone was invented in 1876.

Radio transmission and reception was invented by Marconi in 1899. The first radio broadcast to the public was 1920. The beginning of modern data processing was very early in the 1900s with the invention of the punch card and card reading equipment. Hand powered mechanical calculators became motor driven. The first completely electronic desk calculator was in the 1960s -- it ran on vacuum tubes.

Computers were introduced during WWII. Some of them were mechanical (like the code-braking machines), some were electro-mechanical, and all of them were unwieldy but effective. Even for the early NASA projects, teams of human "calculators" did the complex math on paper.

Things like cell phones don't spring into being all at once. The cellphone grew out of developments in computerization, miniaturization, old-fashioned telephone network technology and radio technology. Launching cell phone systems required substantial analysis and long-range planning.

A lot of what appears to be brand new and amazing is old technologies combined and perfected over time. The component ideas behind the smart cell phone go back decades.

Maybe the technology has not changed much over the last decade, but society's use of that technology has changed.
When mobile phones first appeared they were very expensive, now they are so cheap that almost everyone uses them. And because so many people now use smart phones they are used instead of computers for social networking. You don't have to go home and sit at the desktop, or find a place to connect your laptop to the internet to tell everyone what you ate for lunch.

- Are we discussing changes that are occuring/recently occured or changes that happen to have caught one's attention (aka relevant to one's individual worldview/experience)?

- Are we discussing things that are in everyday mainstream "pop-culture" or things that are in the field/"current domain" of specialists yet to be applied to the everyday mainstream "pop culture"?

- Is one's awareness of changes the best indicator of the rate of changes that occurs worldwide?

* I kind of wonder if there isn't possibly a bit of Declinism combined with a touch of focalism, availability heuristic, clustering illusion, focusing effect, mere exposure effect and observer-expectancy effect going on here, but I have far too little information to do more than just guess.

(assumption of a given)
Perception of change requires attention.
Attention requires/implies some sort of interaction within a worldview.

- If a change occurs that is not within one's worldview it would be perceived due to it not attracting one's attention?

or

- Can change occur without one perceiving that a change has occured?

Final question...

- What is the standard of measure of "tempo" implied? (if something has slowed it must logically have a standard of measure of tempo from which the current state of affairs has slowed in relation to... and is this implied standard of measure of tempo indeed an accurate assumption of tempo?)

Meow!

G

Over the last few years, machine learning has taken off. It's not new, but the data and processing power available reached a threshold where it started to give good enough results for everyone to jump on board.

The VR/AR stuff is seeing some commercial adoption. Someone already mentioned self-driving cars, although they're still in the testing phase, so that puts them behind VR. Big Data has been rather influential. Progress is being made on quantum computing.

It's probably a matter of when certain highly visible technologies gain widespread adoption, even though they existed in some form for years before then.

However, I'm not convinced that technology has been accelerating the past several decades compared to the late 18th century though the middle of the 20th. I think it has slowed down a bit, relatively speaking. At least as far as big transforming technologies go. We have computers, the internet and cell phones. They had electricity, automobiles, aircraft, vaccines, major breakthroughs in physics, etc.

Bill Gates says the argument that technology is slowing is stupid. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/284392/