All humans are very interested in their present and want to feel it's special. Even brilliant minds like Nassim Taleb fall for this "the present is special" syndrome.
Do you think that the guy who discovered making buckets with palm leaves to draw water from the river or well didn't change the outlook of his town? All townspeople said at that time-this is major discovery, and will change forever the way we draw water. Or a better known example-the discovery of fire. Do you think that is was less significant? Or putting meat on fire to cook it? Or discovering copper and gold? Or the steam engine, the telegraph, the telephone, etc. etc. My point is, that there's nothing special about the present. What is so special to you will be the past in 200 years. And the pace of innovation etc. is the same as before-you think somehow that the man who invented the ax is any less intelligent than the one who invented the washing machine? It is simply our obsession with the present.
It is good to think of improvement as a slow, gradual and constant phenomenon, and the velocity of it probably is the same as before (innovations and improvements per head in the population), or at least is not known. There is no such thing as an "Industrial Revolution" in Europe in 1600 or 1500, it was a gradual, slow move. Adam Smith didn't even mention this in his writings in the 1740-1776 time frame-you would think that the founder of Economics would have mentioned it. This was a word coined later, and it really caught on...you would think that Europeans were doing nothing important before the Industrial Revolution. I am sorry to disappoint you in saying that there are no technological or scientific revolutions-they are your way of making human progress more discrete and probably simply because it becomes easier to remember the time-line of progress by these discrete jumps, and you can write a story much easier with these discrete achievements of humanity (Nassim Taleb mocks at these stories and tells us about how we love to tell them).
Here's what Alfred Russell Wallace wrote in "The Malay Archipelago", printed in 1860:
"During the last century, and especially in the last 30 years, our intellectual and material advancement has been too quickly achieved for us to reap the full benefit of it. Our mastery over the forces of nature has led to a rapid growth of population, and a vast accumulation of wealth; but these have brought with them such an amount of poverty and crime, and have fostered the growth of so much sordid feeling and so many fierce passions, that it may well be questioned, whether the mental and moral status of our population has not on the average been lowered, and whether the evil has not overbalanced the good...:
This is Wallace, one of the most brilliant men of his times-and he fell for "the present is special!". I chuckled when I read this.
Here's a present day example of a big tech guy talking about how Software is important-it apparently is eating the world. Obviously he is a software buff. In that article, you can replace the word "software' by microchips, telephone, telegraph, steam engine, ax, wheel, extraction of copper, etc. and you could come up with the same conclusion, that each of these was such an important thing for humanity!
Many such examples can be culled from published literature since as long as you can find something written (centuries!), where authors, philosophers, etc. are talking and are worried about things moving too fast, too much scientific and technological development etc. It is amusing when you realize that your times are not that special-and one day a few hundred years from now your times will be looked at as the slow, non-technological past; just as you think about the middle ages or life before Christ.
Globalization is nothing new
The same thing is true for words like globalization. A big deal is made out of something which has been going on for centuries. Columbus discovered America because he wanted cheap stuff from India via sea. Clearly there was lot of trade between India and Europe at that time for him to get funds for this venture. The silk road has been around for thousands of years, so China also has been a fairly active trade partner for Europe. The total amount of trade between all these blocks of the world would be much less, because of much smaller human populations and lower standards of living (as you get richer as a nation you can trade more with other nations, even if your population doesn't change), but global trade has been going on for a long time, and is nothing new.
To think that somehow globalization is faster now, has accelerated now is the same fallacy as above; it is hard to measure "the speed of globalization" and given the arguments here, it is best to assume that globalization is also a slow, gradual process in general; with some spurts here and there. In 3200 AD we will become the middle ages for our progeny, and they will lament at how backward things were, and global trade is much bigger in 3200 AD than in 2000 AD, etc. etc.
I must point out, that in whatever I have read by Darwin and Smith, I have never seen them falling for "the present is special" fallacy.
The only thing special about the present is that you are alive in it.
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