The proposition I make is that wage growth halted for the average (median average) American in the 70s. The same phenomenon spreads to other Westernized countries too later on, most dramatically evident in the island of Japan which has spent 30 years keeping up maintenance.
Alongside this I proposed (here or elsewhere on HN) that we were and are yet presently living in a stagnant period. The thesis is well laid out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4
Stagnation is not a plateau or a halt to growth, but a slowdown in the rate of change. So there is some change, just not much relative to former periods. The economist Robert Gordon has written a life's work on the subject. He may be wrong, but it is not a stupid idea.
The items you mention are examples of incremental improvements in existing technology. This is not unimportant, it is at least half the battle since what is the point of high technology if nobody can access its utility.
However my worry, and that of Levchin, Page, Gordon, Musk and Thiel is that we are not seeing breakthrough technologies able to scale up and this is a very troubling sign for the future.
Energy production and storage, space travel (Musks's entire rationale is reasoned on the Stagnation Hypothesis), biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology, central coordination, many important areas in our society are in some form of decay, diminishing returns are evident. Lots of PR and press releases but no impacts. Investors have gone bust in many of these areas, esp. in biotech, nanotech and cleantech. If everything is improving that shouldn't be happening.
Again, the benchmark is not no change. The benchmark is the past history of those areas. You can pick bright spots in each industry and high achievements but we do not see things like technologies to make heart attacks impossible or cheap aerogel insulation, the kinds of leaps we made in the past that really lifted all boats.
This can be difficult to believe if you live in a modern western city, but if you go to the peripheral of our world you can visibly see it rotting away. This is because it is not the center of the system that fails first, it is the peripheral.
In a period of rapid true growth you see whole new fields of development opening up from what used to be small niche fields (like computation used to be).
It is not about having faith in the future or technology, it is that we have to come up with business plans and ideas that make things happen or it is entirely plausible they never will happen. Believe me, I want a better future as well, I'm not trying to drag you down because I have a cynical personality or something like that.