The Wright Brothers first flight occurred in 1903, and a little more than half a century later the first man was in space. Things like the cell phone, the Internet, and other modern marvels have occurred relatively recently, so that got me thinking on whether or not our distant ancestors thought they were living in incredible technologically advanced times.
Technology is progressing at an exponential rate. If you chart the significant human creations on a timeline (Wheel, Fire, Literacy, Electricity, MicroProcessors, etc), they look rather linear on a log chart. Ray Kurzweil has another way of explaining it as well: for long periods of history, you could shift a person forward or backwards in time by hundreds of years, and very little would change. In the course of the recent centuries, we see massive changes within a short period, and more recently, multiple massive changes within a single lifetime! Computers, Internet, SmartPhones etc each have had world changing impact.
Recent changes are simpler to notice as they're happening in the course of a single generation. Past changes have also had an exponential acceleration, but since there could still be pauses of multiple generations, even exponential change would not have been apparent to a single generation.
I guess this was more like a book report. The below book is great, I recommend it.
Source: 'The Singularity Is Near' by Ray Kurzweil