How technological progress works

Matt Yglesias takes a look at some predictions from 1968 about what life would be like in 2008, and finds them wanting. Tyler Cowen notes that they basically got transportation wrong (they thought we'd have flying cars, transcontinental rockets, etc.), but computers right. To me, this says two things:

1. 1968 was an era of cheap energy, and people apparently predicted it would keep getting cheaper. It didn't. For decades, we kept discovering cheaper and cheaper energy sources, culminating with oil; since then, though, we haven't found anything cheaper (indeed, oil itself is getting progressively more expensive). So we've invented flying cars and transcontinental hyper-planes, they're just hyper-expensive to use.

2. When predicting technological advances, predict rapid advancement in new areas, and slower advancement in old areas. In 1968, computers were pretty new, so they kept growing at an exponential rate; cars and planes, however, had already been advancing quickly for more than 50 years. So expect biotech (and hopefully environmental tech) to take off in the next 50 years, while computers mature.

Actually, once again, I'm amazed with how much those predictors got right. Internet news, things that sound like e-mail and autoCAD, prefab homes, scheduling software, e-commerce, credit cards, big-screen TVs, web TV, computerized agribusiness, and electronic health monitoring devices. In fact, the only big things they got wrong were A) transportation stuff, and B) climate-controlling city domes. The rest is all here or coming soon.