Many small steps all the time with occasional huge ones. T’was ever thus.
For example, since the discovery of penicillin, a huge step, there have been thousands of small ones.
Now that we have discovered DNA and how it works, sequencing and medical repair proceeds apace, but it aint done in ten days.
No, not over at all.
Or, should there be a pause while the focus is turned to solving problems, like how to mitigate the consequences of extreme heat and drought that are almost certainly the result of our behaviour, the spread of diseases in this connected world that we’ve created, poverty etc. Technological progress is exciting but I feel more and more that it is obscene to spend so much money on these things when half the world has no food and water/can’t heat their homes/has no future.
Well, I don’t agree about Einstein - but in any case he is not a central figure in Kuhn’s work, and was just one example in my post (which also alluded to Copernicus, Darwin, Lavoisier, and Quantum Theory). Kuhn’s analysis is of how all science progresses - it’s replete with many examples - and is widely regarded as the most important such work - I highly recommend it.
Geoff, I think you’re un agent provocateur trying to initiate an interesting debate because, due to the canicule, SF threads have been a tad pedestrian of late and of course some - moi?!!! have thought twice before posting fly remarks about football and politics.
In the past quarter century, or more accurately twenty years, the Internet has changed social space for better and for worse, certainly people’s uses of it have been myriad and the consequences very far reaching.
Less double edged is a decline in people’s ability to independently navigate, and I don’t just mean reading OS or IGN maps. If one is so disconnected from one’s immediate physical that you can only comprehend your location and immediate navigation, this is close to the loss of a sense.
A further disconnect from the physical environment is looking at a phone, rather than the sky to know the immediate weather forecast.
And of course one can look up half-remembered pieces of info - but that’s something I don’t do. If I can’t remember a name, usually of an artist, I keep trying different mnemonic routes to the source
So, to (fairly) succinctly respond, I think most of us are unable to imagine the changes that will come about in the next thirty years, but most on SF will be cushioned from their worst consequences
In which case, you don’t agree with Einstein.
I think we may have arrived at a point where progress has paused while we all try to catch up with the technology that is already available.
This laptop is no doubt capable of doing at least 10,000 things that I am completely unaware of, and thus will never use. I venture to suggest that as there are so many different ways to use the technology that we already have, that many innovative minds are busy working out ever newer ways to utilise existing technology.
Then again, perhaps folks have started to consider the wisdom of ever more technology. Keep going down the artificial intelligence road and the machines will become more and more powerful, and soon will realise that the main stumbling block to their efficiency are the humans.
So then the question becomes one of whether technological advancement is in fact progress or an inevitable disaster.
Going forward to reduce waste and re use in a circular economy the things we manufacture is progress and is gaining pace.
Well in a way - but I really do think I have seen much less dramatic technological change than my grandfather did, and I wonder why.
As @NotALot asks - where are the flying cars? hover-trains? space travel?
We landed on the Moon in 1969 - I thought we’d be on Mars in the 80s.
Sometimes I wonder if the obsession with ‘smart’ devices, ‘the internet of things’, ‘Web2’ or whatever number we’re on now, have absorbed all the energy that used to go into really big technological change.
So you prefer us to have more fuel consuming modes of transport with pointless space tourism. Hover trains, alive and well in Japan and others, yet another british invention that went abroad, my whole reason for not backing HS2.
Some people cannot handle two dimensional travel let alone 3, we are not all airplane pilots, flying cars, it would be carnage!
The idea of going and populating another planet, for I may say the 2% that could afford it just to allow us to screw this one up further? Sort of an American ideal, Mom will get you a new one, throw the old one in the trash.
I agree Corona - but then from the environmental perspective most past technological development - such as cars and aircraft - have also been disastrous.
But it’s not really environmental concerns that have stopped, or slowed, change over my whole lifetime, is it?
And what about changes that would be environmentally positive - eg. fission reactors?
There are a couple of things here - for one it is easier to look back at a period in history and identify the big social and technological changes that occurred with in it, it is much harder to see how changes which are happening around you are going to pan out. A 30 year timespan (say, from the invention of the automobile to its relative ubiquity post WWI) looks compact when viewed 150 years after the fact but it is almost half a lifetime when it is slowly unfolding in front of you.
Second, I think you are underestimating the impact of modern communications, GPS, the miniaturisation of digital electronics and the Internet - all of which have been truly transformational. I am sure that if you plucked someone from the 1970’s and dropped them into the modern world they would be almost as lost as someone plucked from the 1870’s and dropped into the 1970’s
Why?
The Apollo programme was politically driven, once we’d (or rather the US had) “beaten the Rusky’s” interest waned rapidly. It was also enormously expensive, yet a drop in the ocean compared with a manned Mars programme - which would also be technologically at least 100x as hard.
There is no commercial and not that much scientific gain from going to Mars, are you genuinely surprised we haven’t done it? (notwithstanding Musk’s grandstanding on this issue - mysteriously *he* hasn’t really got anywhere with his Mars programme either).
Most people can’t drive on roads, you want them in the air?
Seriously, small planes are basically flying cars and can be had for a similar range of $$$/€€€/£££ - what stops them being ubiquitous is the regulation surrounding them because they are simply more dangerous than cars you need better training before you get behind the jopystick and most people can’t be bothered.
You’ve heard of Maglev I presume?
Again, to where, for what commercial gain? Partly to answer that, of course, there is currently a very healthy industry delivering objects to low earth orbit which did not exist at all in the 1970’s.
I think you are looking in the wrong direction.
to which I can attest - except that with better training and continued examination and medical assessments (often not the case in road transportation necessarily) safety improves above that of other general forms of transport. A good pilot is always learning…
Interesting points - but a little frustrating in that your thinking seems to stop short of any real explanation.
For example, it’s true of course that the Apollo programme was politically driven, and behind this lay the panic over the explosive Soviet growth rate throughout the 50s - and of course the gathering strength of communists in the anti-colonial movements around the world - ie. the US fear that the ‘communist’ system really was superior and would take over the world.
But does this mean that rapid technological progress requires political intervention or external threat? (It’s certainly true that it is often an offshoot of war or war-preparations.)
And isn’t this contradicted by your other points - which are mainly that the sorts of technological developments envisaged by little boy Geof in the 60s turned out to be too difficult or too dangerous?
What happened to ‘we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard’ ?
Ayup lad, remember it well. Looking through the icy windows up Blackstone edge and watching the cars and lorries crossing the viaduct on the M62.
We were lucky in those days as my grandad was the coalman so we always had a good supply of coal, slack and coke in the cellar, but we kids were by far robuster and less mentally fragile than they are today.
Lack of time rather than anything else I’m afraid.
That was always a lie though - the real reason was “we choose to do these things, not because they are easy but because it will be embarrassing for our enemy to beat us to it”.
We *are* doing big space projects for the sake of the knowledge that they will bring - the James Webb telescope is a good example. It is *also* a good example of the rate of change since it is unlikely it would have been feasible even in the 1990’s
The ISS is doing science “for the sake of it”.
We’re quietly getting on with it, rather than huge headline-generating (and massively expensive) programmes.
If the regulations would be applied to driving cars and cars themselves, there would be far less accidents on the road. I dont agree with “they are more dangerous”. The higher level of training and instruction required to obtain a pilots licence is primarily not only to know how and why it flies, and how it works under the bonnet, but also to instil the limitations of the beast and countermeasures to be taken in the event of. All the pilots I know and have met in 50 years of flying, are all members of the self preservation society. When I see some of the actions of the car drivers on the roads these days it make me shudder.
Walked Blackstone Edge many times over 30 years or so before moving to France. It was one of my favourite walking spots. Always parked at the White House next to the reservoir and went from there. Bleak indeed, but wonderful, especially after the snow … as long as the road was passable 
I could look out my bedroom window (up Shore) and look up t’edge. Twas a good weather indication. Later in life I spent many wonderful hours above the Edge in a glider riding the ridge waves or climbing the thermals over Hollingworth. The white house was the indicator of what was to come.
Me included there Roger… it’s as they say - there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but very few (if any) old, bold pilots 
They are all over 100 or so or have been laid to rest with flying colours