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There is always a fringe philosophy that had it right.

Are they right in this case? I see the previous 70 years (1877-1947) as having more fundamental change than the last 70. It's hard to top electricity, automobiles, aircraft, penicillin, vaccinations, refrigeration, radio, tv, QM & Relativity as fundamentally transformative. Also, two world wars transforming the political map and doing away with the dynastic empires of the past.

If you define the singularity as being unable to predict the future, then I would say that period of time would have been less predictable than any other time in human history.

Seems to me that, while QM became "understood" in that period, the transistor was only discovered in the last year. All the applications of the transistor came in the latest 70 years.

There's also the discovery of the gene, and space travel. Those haven't transformed daily life as much as the inventions of the previous 70 years, but add in the transistor and it gets close...

More specifically, progress in physics has slowed dramatically.

This.

Given enough <x>, there will always be a <x> that will outperform / be correct / have predicted / etc in <x> area.

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