Jonathan Huebner

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Jonathan Huebner is a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center, in China Lake, California. He argues on the basis of both U.S. patents and world technological breakthroughs, per population, that the rate of human technological innovation peaked in 1873 and has been slowing ever since. According to his projections we are heading towards a "new Dark Age" of very low innovation rates by sometime around 2024.

There have been several different responses to his claim.

Because his calculations are based on "innovations per person", a steady growth in the global population could match the decline in the rate of innovation per person, preventing such a collapse in innovation happening. But in practice, the global population would have to explode beyond its current size, which some argue is already not sustainable;
He does not take into account the innovation happening in the combining and refining of technologies already discovered. A slowing of innovation rates by 2024, if it happens, will offer us the ability to explore the full range of the incremental applications and combinations of our technological innovations to give us greater capabilities;
Huebner's methodology has been criticised by Ray Kurzweil, who points to the arbitrary nature of the innovations included in Huebner's survey;
Kurzweil also claims that the phrase "new Dark Age" is misleading, since such a technologically-stalled "Dark Age" could in fact be "New Renaissance" in which creativity flourishes as people move their skills to other areas of human culture such as the arts and cultural creativity;
Joel Mokyr argues that the relatively free market in knowledge assures that humanity will still be able to quickly develop new innovations for new problems, even if Huebner's 2024 prediction comes true;
Mokyr also points to the reform of large institutions and organisational approaches as being just as much a contribution to human progress as technological innovation.

[edit] References

Huebner, Jonathon (2005) A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, October 2005, pp980-6 (followed by 12 pages of discussion and response - journal not available online without a password)
Adler, Robert, (2005) "Are we on our way back to the Dark Ages?" New Scientist (no.2506 2 July 2005 pp.26-27) web page