I'm not saying there is no value to incremental improvement, just that there is a qualitative difference between that and true invention and that the latter has stagnated since roughly the early 1970s.

The former makes things faster/better/cheaper, while the latter makes things possible.

You could still ship things across the ocean before containers. But before boats?

I predict that when the current zeitgeist finally does shift we will once again see the invention of things currently considered impossible. I can't say exactly what those will be any more than a scientist in the 1700s could have envisioned radio, though I can certainly speculate. For an early candidate my money would be on the invention of a process to reliably reverse aging in living cells, and maybe something really radical in energy like a compact high density fusion reactor exploiting a novel approach to containment discovered through machine learning. In the long term I strongly suspect that there are fundamental issues with our current models of physics (the whole dark matter 'hack' and the lack of agreement between QM and GR) and that solving this might open the door to things currently considered impossible.

BTW -- I think there have been a few fundamental inventions from 1970 to present.

- Graphene, though I don't know quite enough about materials to know if this has clear antecedents.

- The block chain, which seems like an actual novel mathematical discovery as well as a CS basic invention. It also seems pregnant with social implications since it might suggest a way to actually make communal self-governance by consensus work.

- CRISPR/CAS9

All those happened in the past 10 years or so, which fits in with the idea that the dark age is on its way out.