User:Steve Quinn/Technological innovation peak

A technological innovation peak may have been reached during the final quarter of the 19th century, as argued by Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center, in China Lake, California. He argued on the basis of both U.S. patents and world technological breakthroughs, per capita, that the rate of human technological innovation peaked in 1873 and has been slowing ever since. In his article, he asked "Will the level of technology reach a maximum and then decline as in the Dark Ages?" In later comments to New Scientist magazine, Huebner clarified that while he believed that we will reach a rate of innovation in 2024 equivalent to that of the Dark Ages, he was not predicting the reoccurrence of the Dark Ages themselves.

His paper received some mainstream news coverage at the time.

The claim has been met with criticism by John Smart, founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, who asserted that research by technological singularity researcher Ray Kurzweil and others showed a "clear trend of acceleration, not deceleration" when it came to innovations. However, in 2010, Joseph A. Tainter, Deborah Strumsky, and José Lobo confirmed Huebner's findings using U.S. Patent Office data.