>More like technology evolves in spurts. Huge gains within a specific area for 2-3 decades and then only small incremental advancements for the next 2-3 decades.

I'd expect that the time scales between spurts, while getting shorter over the past 350 years or so, were generally much, much longer.

We first started using stone tools more than 2.5 million years ago. We didn't start effectively using fire for another 500-750k years.

It was another 1.75 million years before we began harvesting seasonal "crops" we identified in our nomadic travels, and another tens of thousands of years before we founded permanent agricultural settlements.

Doing so (and the food surpluses enabled by such) allowed for specialization and R&D into stuff that wasn't directly related to food production.

That really kicked off a technological spurt, which included writing -- a technology that was, perhaps, the biggest step forward, until Liebniz/Newton's Calculus.

Given the immaturity of our current understanding of physics (Standard Model/General Relativity), biology (DNA research) and the like, it seems we're likely to continue without another spurt for quite some time.

I, of course, could be wrong. But since history is often a good guide to the future, I don't think so.