I don’t think this necessarily disproves Derb & Steyn, but it’s worth a gander:

Derb and Steyn and anyone who says technology is slowing are wrong.
Take an Army or Air Force General from 1947 and show them an M-1A1 and an
F-15E Strike Eagle, or an Su-27 Fighter Bomber variant and then show them
how powerful a modern aircraft or tank is. For example, an F-15E can weigh
nearly twice as much as a B-17 fully loaded and fly much faster and farther.
Today a modern Marine or Army squad of 8 has more firepower organically than
a platoon of 43 soldiers in 1947 without calling on artillery or air
support. When the modern military is able to call on all assets, like in
Afghanistan in 2001-02 they are almost godlike when compared in 1947.
Just in modern land combat there have been technological revolutions which
are continuing. For example, look at the bombs and stores deployed in 1991
and 1999 to OIF.
C-121 Constellation 1947 – Weight 145,000 lbs
C-17 Globemaster III – 2005 – Maximum Takeoff Weight 585,000 pounds
Technology is advancing just as fast as before, faster in many realms, but
its background advancement, Nanotech, Biotech, Computing, Genetics,
Materials Sciences, rather than the big things that just pop up on the
street like – Cars.
If you took an early Pilot of a Jet or an Aerospace Engineer from the late
40s or early 50s and plopped them down in a modern Jet like an A-340 or
B-777-300ER and talked about the fact that a modern Jet Engine has a .003 in
100,000 hours failure rate they’d look at you like you’d just caught on fire
and spoke Latin backwards to them.
If you grabbed Bill Gates or Andrew Grove from 1980 and sat them down in
front of a modern PC with a 2-4 GHz CPU and a gigabyte of RAM with it’s 250
GB hard disk they’d be stunned by the progress in 25 years.
Show a housewife from 1947 and iPod and explain you can get 20,000 songs in
it…1947 couldn’t handle today any better than someone from 1897 could.
My Grandmother took University Physics in 1948, she got an A, I took it in
1993, I got a B-, she harped on me for that and my retort was, there’s a lot
more Physics now than in 1948 Grandma.