Jonathan Huebner is a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center, in China Lake, California. He argued on the basis of both U.S. patents and world technological breakthroughs, per capita, that the rate of human technological innovation peaked in 1873 and has been slowing ever since. In his article, he asked "Will the level of technology reach a maximum and then decline as in the Dark Ages?"
The claim has been met with criticism by John Smart, founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, who asserted that research by Ray Kurzweil and others showed a "clear trend of acceleration, not deceleration" when it came to innovations.
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