This is an area that has been little little explored by futurists...the nature of technological innovation is changing. The internal combusion engine's basic design has changed little in a half century, it's performance has pretty much reached physical limits, improvement is coming from the digital enhancements to old components such as ignitions, carburetion, etc brought about by microprocessors. Even in the sciences, some equipment, like telescope optics, were already as good as they could possibly be a century ago. Progress has come by applying digital technology to these devices. We can't make steam turbines any more efficient than they were a century ago, we can just make them lighter and longer-lasting with computer-aided design and modeling.

In my opinion, we are approaching natual limits in many areas of engineering, but the frontier is still a long way off in the potential for improvements in computational devices and their applications. What I find personally amazing is how consumers have embraced some of these devices and driven such innovation. Personally, I would have thought the telephone long ago reached its pinnacle of development, only portability remained to be addressed. And I never would have guessed that computers would be part of the control panel of almost every machine on the planet.

I think I have identified two major regimes in technological development, the first is mechanical and is represented by steam and internal combustion technology, optics and hydraulics. The mechanical components of most modern machines would have been easily recognizeable to engineers from the Victorian age.

The second regime is information and control, and can be further subdivided into the electrical (dynamos, motors, transformers, etc), electronic (analog circuits and vacuum-tube tube tech), and now digital. The digital revolution is the scariest: in the past you had to design a component or circuit to perform a specific task. Today, you program a processor to do anything you want. It's the all-purpose machine.