Perhaps. OTOH, even the Atari 2600 was already a consumer-grade mass-market product; gene sequencing is only now getting there.
To be honest, there are a few other times and places where technological progress has been even faster like Japan between 1865 and 1945 or Shenzhen between 1975 and 2020. Nevertheless, such meteoric rises are a vanishingly small part of human history. There are lots of places and industries where the last 40 years have seen only very modest improvements, quite a few where the trend has been to modest decline, and some where the decline has been horrible (e.g. Lebanon, Yemen, Zimbabwe). In my extremely subjective, non-expert opinion, the rationalist community’s expectations for technological progress are reasonable for computer technology (until recently) but are unreasonable compared to recent trends in industries like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction, medicine, and many more. In other words, it has a strong bias toward optimism.
There are probably others. Genome sequencing is commonly cited as having been substantially faster, going more orders in fewer decades.
Perhaps. OTOH, even the Atari 2600 was already a consumer-grade mass-market product; gene sequencing is only now getting there.
To be honest, there are a few other times and places where technological progress has been even faster like Japan between 1865 and 1945 or Shenzhen between 1975 and 2020. Nevertheless, such meteoric rises are a vanishingly small part of human history. There are lots of places and industries where the last 40 years have seen only very modest improvements, quite a few where the trend has been to modest decline, and some where the decline has been horrible (e.g. Lebanon, Yemen, Zimbabwe). In my extremely subjective, non-expert opinion, the rationalist community’s expectations for technological progress are reasonable for computer technology (until recently) but are unreasonable compared to recent trends in industries like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction, medicine, and many more. In other words, it has a strong bias toward optimism.