The pace of change
Many authors, like Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, have written about a "great stagnation" where the pace of technological change has slowed down (especially outside the software industry). Alexander Kiselev offers a contrasting perspective (quote originally posted to Hacker News):
"I wasn't around those earlier decades so I don't have that perspective, but I do remember the transition from dial up to Tracphones to smartphones and IMO the change hasn't slowed down, it's just become more distributed.
I recently designed a PCB for a custom built 3D printer for a tenth of the cost (fab + assembly) of a board of similar complexity I made nearly a decade ago and the final cost of the 3d printer (based on an open source design) was a 20th of the price of the Stratasys Dimension Elite I purchased, also a decade ago. One of my next projects is to make a DIY semiconductor fab using just TI DLP micromirrors and a microscope because I want to experiment with DIY bio microfluidics - all based on technology and knowledge so common that it has trickled down to the hobbyist level. We've now got people building electron microscopes and genetically modifying organisms in their garages! [NOTE: lots of examples here, https://www.youtube.com/c/thethoughtemporium/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid]
The robots I've worked with in clinical diagnostics are much more advanced now than they were a decade ago and are now cheap enough for the average lab. The metrology instruments and machining tools necessary to make high precision parts have become commonplace at manufacturers, factory automation robotics like 6-DoF arms have trickled down to the researcher and hobbyist level in the last 5 years, and agriculture is currently going through it's n-th revolution with software, remote sensing, and data science.
Every time I leave an industry for a few years and come back, the pace of change is staggering - it's just hidden behind the iron curtain."
I'm not completely sure, but I would guess that it's the curtain between producers/engineers/scientists and consumers. Most people don't know very much about science or most of the things that they buy. Heck, I myself just found out from Laura Vaughan last week that there were already two HIV vaccines in late-stage clinical trials.