Originally Posted by Zeraph

I would generally disagree.

As far as the past goes, what was really going on in development was societies' structure, technology was a byproduct. It took us thousands of years not to invent the combustion engine, but to make an economy and a society that could support such productions. There was too much war and famine in the past to really be able to focus on tech and more importantly the education to support it.

My support for this conclusion is take a look at history, we are discovering more and more that they knew way *way* more than we thought they did. They knew advanced metallurgy that we still haven't rediscovered. They're tech was good, it just never had a chance to flourish. We kept getting this big relapses (i.e. dark age) in tech because of new regime changes.

Now as far as the future goes, it will speed up to a certain degree, but not to the point of exponentionally increasing tech. In other words it won't go vertical as you suggest. We run into bottlenecks all the time. The current one in microchips is that we can't go much smaller like we used to, because of heat problems on such a scale. So now we see dual processors, basically running two separate ones together. So eventually we do run into bottlenecks that really slow things down in a certain field. Now there are still many fields in their infancy, so we will see an increasing growth for awhile, but sooner or later it will slow dramatically, and we'll see an inverse curve in which our tech increases are dramatically slower to the point of almost no advancement anymore.