The thing with technological progress is that it's hard to predict it's direction. People in the 50's were expecting space travel and flying cars, not www, wikipedia, geonome sequencing, World of Warcraft and iPhones. And yet, now that we have them, we do consider them significant technological progress. So perhaps the next things that will come up will be equally unexpected but equally useful. It's hard to measure speed when the thing you're measuring changes form every few years.

The multicore crisis appears to be continuing:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/a-picture-of-the-multicore-crisis/

For a more recent graph, see:

http://orangecone.com/archives/2010/07/peak_mhz.html

According to The Singularity is Near we should have topped 11Mhz last year.

Clock speed is a pretty critical metric for tech progress. Not so exponential, now!

As a metric for rate of technological change, I would want to look at what fraction of economic activity world-wide takes place using novel technologies. That is, what fraction of what we do is based on 5 year old technology vs 50 years vs 500 years vs 5000 years?

The trouble is, how do we interpret "based on"? Suppose I grow GM tomatoes. Agriculture is more than 5000 years old, but in much of the world tomatoes are only 500 years old. Do I count the GM part as 5 years, or 50? And suppose I distribute the tomatoes by airfreight and apply adhesive barcode labels to each tomato to assist the retailers. What fraction of my tomato-growing activity gets listed in each technology-age category.

Is the rate accelerating? I think so. It took 50 to 100 years to really exploit the scientific discoveries of the 19th century (electromagnetism, chemistry, evolutionary biology). Science hasn't produced anything quite so dramatic in the 20th century, but we do seem to be exploiting it more rapidly - more like 25 to 50 years for full exploitation. Flight, atomic power, computers, antibiotics, lasers. Plus, a much smaller fraction of mankind is, say, more than 50 years behind the leaders than was the case 100-200 years ago.

I'm generally of the opinion that by most reasonable standards technological change is not accelerating. There have been periods that involved very rapid technological progress. For example, between 1890 and 1905 you have the invention of the radio, car, and the spread of the automobile. Aside from direct technology, that period also saw the discovery of special relativity and the discovery of radioactivity. Compared to that time period, almost any period in time looks like a slow crawl. We haven't had anything at all as game-changing as radio or airplanes for some time. Even if one argues that the world wide web counts (which is itself questionable since it is only an addition to the pre-existing internet), that was in the early 1990s. We've gone some time with steady improvement of existing technology, but very little that is impressively new.

As far as Eliezer is concerned (with respect to the singularity) the important measurement is "best available technology" and not "average household technology". If you beleve in a singleton scenario for the singularity, it's the most advanced computers and other technologies that will probably be used.

I regularly see technology that makes me wonder what we'll have five years or ten from now - Wikipedia, 3D MMOs, smartphones, calculators, all the stuff you can buy online. I'm generally disappointed: today, World of Warcraft is the most popular MMO, as it was five years ago. The top-of-the range calculators (TI 92) are the same as when I was in school, when they just came out, etc. Wikipedia is neater than it was five years ago, but not extraordinarily so. But still, when I ask my parents, it doesn't seem that in their time they had brand new nifty impressive stuff hitting the world as often - they weren't wondering "damn, what will it be like in 5 years!".

I think that when it comes to technology, our "foreseeable future" has been shrinking. So I'd say "probably accelerating", but I'm open to evidence.

Moore's law just tracks The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit.

This seems like a rather ridiculous metric - if you go asynchronous, you can cover really large areas without too much difficulty. Edit: Moore's law is to do with price and performance.

This is easy. We just have to measure how much technology changed from year to year for the last 100 years or so, and then eyeball the curve. Does anyone have that data?