Generations before us made huge advancements as well. The industrial revolution for example. Manufacturing in factories has changed how the entire world operates. Or for Egyptians, I’m sure they used intricate pulley systems to move large bricks for building those pyramids.

We speculate of the future, just like I’m sure previous generations would have…I think of colonizing other planets, moons, etc…whereas they might have thought about flying machines, and new and better weapons for war.

I think it’s instinctive to think about the future, whether it’s accurate or not.

When civilization started (and by that I mean agriculture, cities, literacy, etc.), it’s like people had to adjust to that for a while. (People aren’t designed to be farmers – it’s backbreaking hard work.) The Mesopotamians and Egyptians, who were some of the first on the scene, had cultures that stayed remarkably the same for much of their existence.

The Greeks, on the other hand, were thinkers. Their culture borrowed from those which had gone before, but theirs changed and evolved – you can see it in their art and philosophy. Close to the end of their cultural reign, they were doing some pretty amazing things – look up anything Archimedes invented, for example. They even had simple machines, like a device where setting a fire on an altar would open doors behind the altar, like a simple steam engine. Also, in a Greek shipwreck was found a pretty darn advanced ‘analog computer’ of gears and such that could tell where the main planets would be with great accuracy into the future. The Greeks, imho, seemed poised on the brink of an industrial revolution of sorts.

Then Rome came and squashed that innovative spirit. Rome wasn’t about innovation, it was about making everyone good vassals to Rome. They put the kibosh on things like that, and after Roman dominion ended, we had the Dark Ages. Things didn’t get back to what you might call “on track” until the Renaissance.

Once humans passed the threshold in the Paleolithic where they first realized that things like art and innovation were possible, progress has been in fits and starts in different places and different times – it’s not a smooth line upward. It’s often related to the political climate of the area (is innovation okay?) and resources (if they don’t have enough to feed themselves, they’re not going to spend time thinking of other stuff). If you want a more detailed answer, check out Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It’s pretty good, and this is a question that would take a book to answer properly. ;)

depends what ’‘recently’’ you are talking about. if you mean within the lst 4000 or so years then what laureth said. if you mean since the 50’s it was computers and electronics. it should all slow down for a while in the next 50 years or so, when CPU’s reach their limit. atomic level.

EDIT:

then again, i dont think we have done that badly considering we are just a bunch of glorified apes wandering around on a wet ball of mud in a big black thing full of sparkly bits.

I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the Egyptians though, laureth. Their cultural wealth was arguably as great as the Greeks, it’s just that much more Greek culture was preserved, whereas much Egyptian stuff was trashed. Plus, have you seen those freaking Pyramids?

Not to mention, even more ancient cultures achieved some incredible feats of engineering. Stonehenge is made of blocks dragged from Wales, for example.

The thing is, “advancement” is always relative to what you’re advancing from. Sure, we could build another Stonehenge now, but the fact that they did it then with nothing but chisels and logs is really damn impressive. The invention of controlled fire, or of writing, would have been an enormous advancement for the time, even if it doesn’t seem like it now.

The simple answer is that technological advancement is an exponential curve. We are now reaching the part where technological advancement can be seen in ones own life. If you think this is fast, image how fast it will be in, say, 50 years.

Yes, the Egyptians (and lots of other people) built pyramids – but they seem to have stopped there. Their art was pretty much the same from beginning to end.

I’m not talking about things like pyramids. I mean technology like radios, TV’s, cars, Mp3 Players, etc. Even lights!

@Parrappa
You have to understand though that was the technology of the time.

Discoveries aren’t made out of thin air. They come from knowing other things that were discovered before, and if you don’t have those prerequisites, you can’t do it.

How much of the stuff you’re talking about rests on the shoulders of discoveries and innovations much too complex for the ancients to make, even if they had been thinking along those lines? You need plastics, insulation for wires, silicon chips, petroleum (which, while used in small quantities for things like waterproofing boats with tar, weren’t really tapped until the oil find at Spindletop in 1901). They just didn’t have the stuff, even if they were curious and innovative.

i think when the silicon chip was realized it caused technology to explode further, faster.

Daily time needed to satisfy basic survival needs.

Also, a lot of human innovation is driven by Need. Rome lagged behind in developing some devices (thereby advancing their technology) because they didn’t need things to save time and effort – they had slaves for that. Human labor was cheap.

Similarly, the pre-Civil War American South lagged behind and didn’t have nearly the farm technology that the North had, because their slaves did the work. Having too much cheap human labor can hold a society back.

money and acceptance

@Parrappa, you seem unfamiliar with the meaning of technology. Simply put, it means using knowledge to do something.

Human beings have been using technology from the moment they picked up objects and began using them as tools. Felling a tree to make a bridge is technology. The pyramids were the product of pretty advanced technology. People have been building on what they know from the time they had a means (language) of communicating learned knowledge so every new generation didn’t have to start over from scratch.

Teaching is the key to advancing technology, but there also has to be a reason or motivation to improve on the way things are. And there has to be support for people just to experiment and try things out and learn pure, unapplied science (on which technology is founded) instead of having everybody focused on hunting, gathering, plowing and harvesting, and other survival skills. In some ages learning and exploring have been a pure luxury.

If you can see the connection between education and advances, you may get an idea of why progress has been uneven.

If having cheap labor holds a society back, so does believing that the way things are was ordained by the gods and that it would be blasphemous to change it.

True, that.