But that's Gordon's whole point. There were really big discoveries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those discoveries powered 50-100 years of economic growth. Today the exploitation of those things have mostly played out. And there's nothing comparable in recent times to rival those innovations.
The computer age so far pales in comparison.
I think there are a lot of massive changes that people are forgetting about-
Do you remember having to go to the library to research basic information? The internet give me instant access to a large portion of the sum of human knowledge. I can comparison shop the world in an instant. I pull up the text of the bible and Shakespeare and search through their entirety in an instant.
I can share knowledge and discuss things like this on message boards with just about anyone in the world, rather than just the sad sacks from my hometown.
I have a device in my pocket that is a phone, a camera, a watch, a GPS, and access to the internet all in one. Its pretty hard to get lost these days. I was always terrible with giving or receiving directions. Now that is trivial.
I haven't been to my bank in ages. I can do all of my banking without making a special trip.
I can have just about any movie I can think of streamed instantly to my home for a small fee through Amazon. Heck, 30 years ago I was thrilled to be able to own a VCR and rent one of the few hundred titles my local video store had. Nothing new was never available because I was never the first one there, of course.
Think about the work people do with just Microsoft office and think about how they would have to have done it before the computer.
My company has 50k+ people working from home or remotely every day. That is a lot of commuting time, gas, and office space saved.
We have medical treatments available that are pretty amazing compared to 40 years ago. My mother would be blind if she lived even 20 years earlier. My father would probably already be dead.
I think about all the things that were so hard and time-consuming before computers when I was a kid. Carbon paper. Retyping things. Figuring out how to do a repair you've never done. etc, etc, etc.
It really is a much better world than when I was a kid.