[jeffreyrogers]

Regardless of whether big tech is doing anything useful it's obvious that we have fewer important innovations now than in the period around the late 19th, early 20th century when we got: electricity, electric motors, dynamite, phones, cars, concrete, planes, tractors, radio, plastic, assembly lines and modern forms of business organization. If we go a little further into the 20th century we get nuclear power and the transistor.

I don't think we'll see another time period like that. But that's not really a bad thing. You can only discover really important things once and then they eventually become part of everyday life. A more interesting question is how to sustain our standard of living when we can no longer expect high economic growth from new innovations.