I think he's making a good point.
You can't deny that the technological advances in the last 15 years were bigger than than in the last 200.
He's just saying that all of that is easily taken for granted.
Although we do enjoy faster and more mobile access to internet and computing in general, most of the advances over the past 15 years are incremental improvements over technologies that already existed back then.
What breakthroughs comparable to the advent of e.g. the train, the plane or antibiotics occured over the last 15 years?
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/338/13/853
> Mortality among the patients declined from 29.4 per 100 person-years in 1995 to 8.8 per 100 person-years in the second quarter of 1997.
Also, I think that today's breakthroughs have much more prerequisites in humanity's knowledge and capabilities in different fields than 200 years ago.
I can and it's nonsense.
Nuclear power? The Electrical Grid? The Industrial revolution? The transportation revolution? Mass airtravel? Genetics? Electronics?
Versus what ? The internet? Cell phones? Sure it's great but it definitely isn't bigger by any yardstick than what preceded it, in fact plenty of those previous inventions were pre-requisites for those to be possible in the first place.
I'd bet you could live just fine in the world of 15 years ago, but I'd challenge you to live in the one from 200 years ago.
The record in mathematics is pretty good. E.g. compiling functional programming languages made huge strides in the last two decades. And so did linear and integer optimization.