Like with all the sciences, the role of the individual has been diminished. Interesting technology may be seeded by some individual genius but it takes a huge n

Like with all the sciences, the role of the individual has been diminished. Interesting technology may be seeded by some individual genius but it takes a huge number of people coordinating to build something like a self-driving car, a breakthrough AI, the LHC. And it takes a lot of really smart people spending most of their time doing relatively banal tasks to pull these off. I think the bar for innovation is just so much higher than it used to be, there is so much knowledge required across so many fields that you either end up a generalist, who rarely gets a chance to dive deep into any one thing, or a specialist who is forever stuck in their one area of expertise.