By the time you finished reading this article, more advances were made in the field of human knowledge than you will be able to comprehend in five years.

The rate at which our society generates change is staggering, and technology is the end result of that change. Found a new polymer? Great, if its cheap enough and easy enough to mass produce, we will have it on the market and in goods in a few years. But people won't notice it.

You see, the changes that happen most often are just improvements on the changes we have already made to society. That's why a battery-powered car really won't catch on like people think it will; its too radically different from being able to fill up a car with portable fuel. Why do you think hydrogen is so appealing as a fuel source? Because its only slightly different than what we already have.

Basic human society has not changed since the Industrial Revolution. By which I mean the society in which you work for regular wages, have currency, have relationships which tend to exist in areas further than a few houses down from you, in which children are considered economic burdens, not benefits, in which information can be gained if you have the money for it, and in which the lifestyle you wish for can be gained with money or credit. And let's not forget the ability to travel the world in a relatively short time.

Cars? Hasn't changed much, not at this really fundamental level. Now you can just travel more at your leisure; it hasn't changed how the family is created, how your job will function (regular wages are still here) or really anything fundamental. Neither does flight, nor chemical processing, nor electronics, nor the internet. But what those technologies have done is vastly change the way in which we receive those fundamental aspects of technology.

The car? Well you can now drive to work in an emergency, you can leave whenever you feel like it; you no longer have to live near a train station after all. Flight? Well how else are you getting all of that fresh food you eat, even though your notions of meals are from Moorish Spain in the 1400s. Chemical processing gives you most of what you own, especially plastics, and electronics and the internet VASTLY change HOW we receive the information we pay for and what sort of information we receive, but do nothing to the fact that we are still paying to receive information.

So the author has a point. He just oversimplifies it, then runs in the opposite direction, and most likely touched upon the point accidentally. If you would like to hear someone who say, actually knows what they're talking about, well, James Burke is a technological historian and gives a much better view on things. By better, I mean more comprehensive, intelligent, and interesting.