Pedro De Heredia posted:

I don't know if this is addressed in the book (it isn't addressed in the review), but there is a difference between types of scientific progress and advances. There are scientific advancements which allow for massive changes in the structure of the economy, by increasing productivity dramatically, reconfiguring what work is, and opening up a plethora of new avenues for employment, and scientific advancements that … don't. There are technologies that change the fabric of society, the way we are organized (usually because of their relationship to economics).. and technologies that don't. That a technology doesn't change society doesn't mean that it didn't take effort.

Video games are a good example of that. Regardless of the size of the videogame industry, they are largely unimportant and trivial. They are a leisure activity which people do in their spare time. The large-scale progress that people are saying has stopped is the progress that creates the spare time that you use to play video games.

Advances in medicine are obviously much more important than video games, but it's difficult to see how these advances will reconfigure economic and social life anytime soon. Certainly it's difficult to see how they will exponentially increase the economy's productivity. Advances in medicine can improve human labor, but we're doing quite well there already, as a vast chunk of people make it to retirement age.

The person who is 30 years old and hasn't seen much change is mostly correct. I am 30 years old too. If I look at my father's life, it's fundamentally not that different than mine. We both grew up with no expectation of dying as children, we both went to school and then college. We do more or less the same thing (do calculations). We have weekends off. It's essentially the same life.