> We all have the tendency to believe that we are living in a very advanced technological period. Not me. For example, clock rates maxed out about 10 years ago

> We all have the tendency to believe that we are living in a very advanced technological period. Not me. For example, clock rates maxed out about 10 years ago, and instead we went to smaller less powerful devices: netbooks, smartphones, tablets. There's generally so many layers that today's computers are about as fast as what I was using 30 years ago (though GUIs were impressive at first.) By Moore's Law, we should be up to cheap THz machines. Recent video games are especially boring, becoming more like cookie-cutter movies. I'm even bored by near-future science-fiction/cyberpunk - e.g. Rainbow's End. It's obvious, trivial; nothing fundamentally new or mind-expanding. 100 years ago seemed more exciting, when telecommunications was relatively new. Trains, planes and automobiles were much more fundamental advances that today's new "technologies". But today's layers are important: they enable customization and adaption to new applications and changing applications. That's very useful for adoption. And so I believe we're currently in a consolidation phase more than an advancing phase, pushing known tech out to the consumer. I hope things will change soon. Perhaps consumer-level DNA synthesis will shake things up... EDIT Alan Kay thinks there haven't been any advances in computing in the last 30 years (he hasn't accepted "the world wide web") http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...