[skoodge]

This trend presupposes an ever-growing accumulation of knowledge and a view of mathematics as a collection of discoveries of "facts". I think most people nowadays hold such a view and it is intimately connected with the idea of progress. Wittgenstein himself was quite suspicious of such an idea, however:

"This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same."

- Wittgenstein, "Philosophical Remarks", Preface

Will the current trend continue so that future discoveries are more and more intricate but also more and more specialised and thus perhaps less interesting? Or will there be a paradigm shift so that we lose interest in many of our "fundamental" results and there will be new low hanging fruits waiting to be "discovered"? Wittgenstein was more sympathetic to the latter view and often countered the view that mathematical results are discovered with the idea that mathematical results are invented (which does not make him a naive constructivist, however).