"I make no secret of the fact that I think real technological progress has slowed in many fields, possibly even reversing itself." states the author at the star

"I make no secret of the fact that I think real technological progress has slowed in many fields, possibly even reversing itself." states the author at the start. That's very hard to defend. However, let me boldly agree in that I think this is true for qualitative change, but not quantitative. I think quantitative changes are rapidly happening, and that's because it's very easy to generate better answers from a set of pre-existing knowledge. Computers (plus their engineers) are very good at that. It's the whole premise of the Semantic Web. The hard thing to do is generate a better set of existing knowledge, and then curating it well. As (perhaps mis-used but I'll use it anyways) Picasso said "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."