I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they should

I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they should be working on and what is worth their time in this modern world with all sorts of crap, and most of the sciences having had a lot of the more obvious or low hanging fruit and what's left is a lot of the smaller, much harder and more expensive to prove, and potentially less interesting aspects of it (Particle Theory, String Theory, etc). Meanwhile some of the best minds of this generation are probably getting sucked into Silicon Valley or the financial industry, a lot of them to work on "yet another social network app" or a better way to trick people into giving you pennies (ads or microtransactions), or in making a slightly better trading algorithm, because that's what pays and academia doesn't come anywhere close to that (plus has all sorts of issues itself besides that). Granted we don't have nearly as much war as we've had in the past, which I'm sure did a great job of killing off all sorts of brilliant minds, so maybe it's balanced out by that a bit. I am not a genius, but I am pretty smart. I consistently scored extremely well growing up, and got put into a lot of accelerated or "gifted" programs, but once I hit the real world I stumbled and spent a lot of my career working for companies or on software that ultimately didn't go anywhere (I did a pretty good job and got paid for them, but the impact they made ended up being minimal). I've got all sorts of ideas of things I could be working on in my spare time, but nothing really stands out as being really worthwhile for society. And anyways the thing that I enjoy doing most right now is designing board and card games, something that the world probably doesn't need more of, honestly (Over a thousand games get released every single year right now, and there are a ton of really great games that come out every year, it's crazy).