It's also important to note that you can only really appreciate the pace of progress in retrospect. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate how quickly things are developing when you are in the thick of it.
There was a good essay about this phenomenon on HN a few years ago but I can't find it anymore. Something about experiencing time in the rear view mirror or something like that.
The future is already here, just unevenly distributed?
The entire species has not triumphed over disease, especially not against virii. Only an unfortunately small percentage of the population who have medical insurance who live in a rich 1st world country and are somewhat lucky have triumphed (temporarily) over microbes, the rest of the species dies like flies from dumb infections. The rest of the list is innovation as defined by minor evolution or profitability or extreme rareness such that is irrelevant. I think that is the wrong definition.
Innovation is a Dr hanging out with the physicists and next thing you know the peculiar optical behavior of ultra-short wavelength xrays passing thru flesh to see bones is applied to patient care. Or resonating the nuclei of hydrogen atoms using unusual shaped magnetic fields to image the hydrogen density of living flesh is applied to patient care. Or blasting a very narrow, moving beam of radiation carves out a 3-d shape of death, surrounded by living tissue, and hopefully that dead tissue was a tumor. That's innovation.
I would contrast that to, now we'll do exactly the same thing we always did exactly the same way (although perhaps slightly faster or slightly more convenient or slightly cheaper) by looking at a pocket sized wireless graphics display instead of using a desktop sized wire connected graphics display. Boring. Maybe profitable, maybe highly profitable, but not innovative or interesting. The world is full of highly profitable completely non-innovative companies, innovation is hardly a universal positive anyway.
For instance, Watt is now known as the bringer of the steam age and its accompanied industrial revolution. But at the time, all he did was a really really tiny improvement on the already existing steam engine.
Or Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. But all he really did was find a half decent way of bringing already existing electricity into homes to power already existing light bulbs. He didn't even do that very well, but it worked.
And what did either of those improve, really? Watt's engine made it possible for miners to work manually a bit longer and slightly safer from flooding. Edison did nothing a candle couldn't. Lightbulbs weren't particularly good back then.
History is littered with Huge Innovations (tm) that were super tiny and incremental when looked at from the context of the time.
Usually you only hear about innovations that are a success, failure is an orphan but success has a million fathers, etc. Therefore by the rules of logic all innovation leads to success. Surely by all rules of logic anything true in one way it true the other way, so all success required innovation. Given that scenario as starting conditions and rules of the game, minor engineering evolutionary improvements that none-the-less are eventually profitable, must be defined as super tiny incremental irrelevant forms of innovation, although they're really just boring gradual evolution.
Or if you really want to muddy the waters there's some fun analogies you can make between evolution vs intelligent design and mere incremental product development and actual innovation, and how both mental models seem to make their owners both really happy and extremely binary in their outlook toward the opposite.
I think this is true of inflection points, but perhaps not true generally. The devil is in the differentiation.
"What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise."
- is what I took from it. It's not so much about the pace of progress, as it is about an establishment that chooses what constitutes creativity.