It’s a common complaint but an incorrect one:
For example, Thiel points out, air travel has hardly improved in decades. In fact, with the demise of Concorde, we now have less access to high-speed air travel than we did 30 years ago.
That is to assume that the only possible improvement to air travel is greater speed. As if the only possible improvement from the agricultural revolution were more turnips. Or the computing revolution meant faster calculators.
Items - goods, services - can improve by many metrics. Along different spectrums if we like. Which they often do in fact. They get to “good enough” along one direction, toward one end of a spectrum, then stagnate in that direction. Cars, say. The first few decades increased speed - safe speed that is - as something that was developed as being able to cruise at 70 mph, or 80, was a great improvement over doing so at 20. But the improvement from 80 to 130 - say - was of must less value. Partly because of the reaction times of the wetware controlling it but also because most to many of the things we might want to use a car for can be done at 70 or 80 and 130 doesn’t add much value. Cars are much safer than they used to be, much more reliable, vastly cheaper for the level of performance than they used to be. All of which are technological improvements. Anyone claiming that car technology hasn’t improved in the last 50 years would be laughed at as a ludicrously ill-informed rube.
Airplanes have hugely advanced in that same past 50 years. Not in speed, true - 520 mph seems to be good enough for many uses - but ‘planes are very much safer than they used to be. Less noisy too. Also, the use of a ‘plane is hugely, vastly, cheaper. Roughly, you understand, just roughly, a trip from Britain to Europe, 50 years ago, cost about a week’s wages. Today it can usually be done for a day’s. And that’s not because wages have risen that much.
To claim that’s not technological advance is, well, rube-ish.
Of course, this becomes important when we consider train travel. Sure, the average speed hasn’t increased in 50 years. This does not mean we require high speed trains. We’ve developed the internet that works on trains now, so time spent on one is not time that is subtracted from working hours. That’s what kills the HS2 cost benefit analysis as it was originally done. And really, anyone want to claim that adding the internet to trains is not a technological advance? As, you know, has also recently been done to ‘planes?