New Scientist looks at the claims of a cynical futurist, who says that the rate of innovative change is slowing. I'm not sure that I buy that, but I don't buy Kurzweil's claims about a bright future of dazzling, mind boggling change either:

At the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a non-profit think tank in San Pedro, California, John Smart examines why technological change is progressing so fast. Looking at the growth of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, Smart agrees with Kurzweil that we are rocketing toward a technological "singularity" - a point sometime between 2040 and 2080 where change is so blindingly fast that we just can't predict where it will go.

We had an era like that, and it was the 19th century. Consider the period from 1815 to 1915 - from the close of the Napoleonic wars to the beginning of the first world war. The start of that period is the dawn of industrialization - prior to then, most people still lived lives of subsistence farming, and never traveled further than about 20 miles from home. By 1915 you had trains, electricity, home heating, machine guns, airplanes - it was a simply dizzying rate of change, and society (in the West, at least) wasn't entirely prepared for it. Those changes spawned many nasty political currents (fascism, communism).

The current era isn't really like that in one very large sense - there's an assumption of progress. People don't really expect things to stay the way they always have - the political shock of the French Revolution, and the technological shock of the Industrial Revolution shook early 19th century society violently, as people were suddenly faced with huge changes on all fronts. We aren't looking at that now, I don't think, even if nano-technology brings a level of unprecedented advancement. Why? Simple because of a greater acceptance and expectation of change.