Entering a dark age of innovation

SURFING the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim.

But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong:
far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a
new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner,
a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in
China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation
reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And
like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg,
Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

Read the full New Scientist article