I am not so stupid as to get in front of Derb and Steyn on an issue of such as this (“Don’t sell yourself short, of course you’re that stupid” — The Couch).

However, I can’t shake the feeling that all of this is missing something. Isn’t it possible that technological change is less fluid and more periodic than these time-line analyses suggest? Everything looks like a smooth line if you plot it the right way. From what I recall from my reading of Human Accomplishment, innovation — technological, artistic, scientific — comes in sudden spurts. Certain places at certain times “suddenly” produce human excellence in astonishing abundance. Murray lays out all sorts of good reasons why this is so in some places and not so in others.

So who is to say we aren’t just milimeters from the next tipping point when technological change rushes in huge gobs? Surely the diffusion of information and the access to it will have some formidible consequences. Presumably the Human Genome Project laid the groundwork for something big? Mark Steyn says that a visitor from fifty years ago would be instantly at home today (or in 1997, same point). I’m not so sure. The buildings would look similar and so would the cars and toilets. But the organization of society might seem pretty shocking to our traveller. I agree that the shock might be greater at first for a traveller from 1897 to 1947, but the shock of the new can often be superficial. It’s not obvious to me the changes of today are less profound. The ability to access thousands of libraries from a shiny box on our desks or in our palms would surely impress. So would news that we’d walked on the moon and grown human ears on mice or that we’d cloned sheep. And who can dispute the impact of stuffed-crust pizza? As Seinfeld’s Elaine has noted, it’s going to be a very long time before they find a new place to put cheese on a pizza.

Also, counting “important” discoveries seems like a fairly crude instrument for measuring this sort of thing. In a year of seven “important discoveries” six might lead to retinal scan cat doors and a cure for male-pattern baldness while a seventh might result in instaneous travel throughout the universe.

Instead of looking at the trendlines, maybe it’s more like fractal geometry. Tiny little changes build up over time until the avalanche. The patterns look chaotic but if you step back far enough and they repeat themselves and build bigger versions of themselves.

Or maybe I should have listened to my couch.