"Unprecedented disease/violence"? Did I miss a pandemic or Great War?

It depends. What does count as change, and how do you want to measure it?

The last few decades have certainly seen their share of changes, but an interesting question with few hard answers is whether these changes have really been of such fundamental and never-before-seen nature as some claim.

Energy historian and, well, polymath Vaclav Smil has famously argued in his books "Creating the Twentieth Century" (2005) and "Transforming the Twentieth Century" (2006) that the period of most rapid fundamental change ever recorded in human history occurred roughly between 1867 and 1914. That period saw the development of the technological foundations of all what we currently associate with modernity: electricity as a practical source of light, heat and motive power; telephone; gramophone; photographs; cars; airplanes; radio; plastics; and assembly line production (to name just a few examples).

It is no wonder that from around 1900, we begin to see in fiction and in illustrations depictions of life in the 2000s that are oddly familiar, despite the details and the clothing being so weirdly out of place. You too may have seen pictures that depict wireless handheld devices, music playing over the telephone lines, fax machines and the like: these were fairly obvious extrapolations from electricity, the means of storing sound and pictures, and the telegraphy and telephone network of the time.

In the decades afterwards, these technologies spread into actual use and changed life all around the world so radically that it may be hard to comprehend. The example I've used often is that of my grandfather: he was born in early 1920s in a log cabin, to a family so poor that they couldn't afford to build a chimney, not to mention enough shoes for their eight children - so everyone couldn't be outside at the same time. (This was Northeastern Finland, so having no chimney and no shoes presents some problems people in the warmer climes might not immediately appreciate.)

When he was a child, the main motive power was horses, and what light was available came from candles and oil lamps - the latter being a relatively recent introduction. Most people would spend their entire lives within some tens of kilometers from where they were born. Some people from his village might travel farther, perhaps taking the train from the nearest town, and a few travelled across the Atlantic on a steamboat - mostly on a one-way trip, as immigrants. There were news about airplanes, but most of the villagers had never seen one. All in all, life in the village he was born into would have been immediately recognisable to a time traveller from the 1500s, perhaps even to a traveller from around 4000 BCE, when my ancestors probably settled the lands there.

But by the time he was fifty, horses were almost totally replaced by tractors and cars, oil lamps were used only if electricity went out, and he had watched the first men land on the Moon from the village's first television set - live as it happened. He still had some years to go before he took his first flight in a jet plane, but visiting the relatives overseas was now a distinct possibility even for a farmer like he was. In theory, he could call anyone in the world via telephone from his home, and had he been an engineer or a scientist, he might have had the opportunity to use computers even. And he had fought in the largest global conflict the world had ever seen, as a very minor cog in the machine that wrecked lives across the entire globe and dramatically changed the world order.

So it all depends. In some ways, changes that are happening now are indeed exceedingly rapid. But do they result to fundamental changes in human lives in the way the inventions made between 1870s and 1920s did? I somehow have my doubts, and so, too, many other historians of technology - Edgerton's "The Shock of the Old" (2006) being one of the more convincing and entertaining reads if you're interested further.

I'll have to limit my answer to electronics in order to be rigorous.

Certainly in electronics, and hypothesized for other fields, technology increases exponentially. There is good evidence for this in electronics with the number of transistors that can be fit onto a microprocessor. This number roughly doubles every 18 months. This is called Moore's Law.

Here is a nice chart of the increase

Note that that chart is a semi-logarithmic scale. That is, the y axis plots transistor number going up by a factor of 10 every tick. This makes the graph a straight line increase. If you didn't have a logarithmic scale the graph would curve upwards like a normal exponential curve.

I have hopefully established that for electronics at least, we're seeing exponential increases in technology.

In a naieve way, this change/progress is indeed unprecedented. We see our transistor counts (on that chart) from 2000 to 2010 being a way bigger increase than any 10 year period previously. (Or 1985 to 1995 if we want to avoid that 20 year rule, the math applies the same).

In a more nuanced sense, the most recent years aren't unprecedented because they're exactly falling along that curve. The increase is as exponential now as it was decades ago. The fact that the slope on the chart remains the same also shows that we have the same exponential increase during this time.

I realize your question was specific to the last 50 year period, and that electronics with microprocessors mostly pertain to that 50 year period. However, I believe that the data from the last 50 years is enough to establish exponential progress, which again is enough to provide the insight that our rate of change isn't unprecedented.

You can also apply Moore's law to many other things, such as hard drive capacity and DNA sequencing, though for the latter the trend isn't as strong and we see a faster rate of change than Moore's law, but still an exponential rate of change.