Ideas Having Sex - Reason Magazine

But the greatest impact of an increasing-return wave comes long after the technology is invented. It comes when the technology is democratized. Gutenberg’s printing press took decades to generate the Reformation. Today’s container ships go not much faster than a 19th-century steamship, and today’s Internet sends each pulse little quicker than a 19th-century telegraph—but everybody is using them, not just the rich. Jets travel at the same speeds they did in the 1970s, but budget airlines are new.

So what is the flywheel of the perpetual innovation machine that drives the modern world? Why has innovation become routine? How was it that, in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, “The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention?”