[TeeDub]

>"There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough."

This is a particularly superb point! I really like this argument.

[dingfeng_quek]

Really depends on your metric of "rate of advancement". If it's going to be about what common people think, then consumer-product and lifestyle innovations would be over-weighted. Viewed by a specialist in any field, that field's progress would be overweighted. From the perspective of productivity increase (or GDP per capita increase), qualitative changes in lifestyle would be underweighted. etc.

Furthermore, even after deciding on a vague sort of metric, it's hard to quantize (choose a measure, in math jargon), advancement to be able to have rates.