Modern Innovation

Modern innovation begins arbitrarily with Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity. This, following on the heels of the Long Depression and a general increase in the capability and employment of machine tools, and preceding the Great War and a general collapse of civilization and its narratives, fueled a truly incomprehensible flood of innovation that became intense and socially pernicious after 1945.
The list of innovations introduced into society in the period, 1905 to 1945, is significant but the list of the period, post 1945, is mind boggling, atomic power, television, the integrated circuit and its transistors, the internet, robots, and, now, gadgets that are organized as the IoT, all of them pushing the limits of the human brain and culture and increasingly going beyond those limits into functional insanity and social chaos.
When an innovation is subject to inclusion into a culture that innovation is accomplished individual by individual. Yes, there are protocols for dealing with technology that are circulated among populations. These do not imply comprehension and they are temporary to task completion. They are a part of machine culture, not human culture. Social acculturation means integrating new ideas into neural networks so that behavior becomes meaningful. If one's behavior is a repertoire of such protocols, a machine culture, then one is a minion of the machines and the only meaning is the machine. That is intolerably inhumane. Thus, the eternal drive to comprehend, to integrate new ideas into a coherent brain mass.
With relativity and quantum mechanics and their esoteric and difficult concepts we find this drive, the drive to meaning, frustrated by the individual limits of the ability to understand, a function of talent and plasticity. Culture moves ahead, semper ad Lucem, incorporating new technology and ideas into humane behavioral systems but it moves slowly in filter bubbles and approximate realities. Compounding this are absolute theoretical limits of comprehension, the universe consists of scalar fields decaying into particles and scalar fields are unknowable, and the absolute limit of general comprehension, as Feynmann once said, nobody understands entropy.
Only with artificial intelligence and IoT gadgets do we see the possibility of a meaningful existence obtained within the comfort zone of the average human being, without performance enhancing drugs, without elitist exclusion. There is, at the logical terminus of technological development, more day to dawn, as Thoreau put it. We may be in sight of that dawn, the dawn of machines adjusting to human beings, the dawn of the truly humane society, but we still have to reach that point of technological development and acculturate it. We are not there yet.