I once asked my mom, who grew up in the 1930s (aside: feels increasingly necessary to specific 19--), what was the biggest technological change she had seen in her lifetime. Her immediate answer was 'indoor plumbing.' But her next answer was the cellphone. She said cars and trains weren't vastly different from when she was a kid, she almost never went on a plane, and that people spent a lot of time watching the TV and listening to the radio, but they used their cellphones more and for far more things.
My grandmother was born at home in 1917. Her father had to hitch up the wagon to go to town to fetch the doctor, and she had been born by the time they arrived. She felt it wasn't any particular innovation that was meaningful so much as the velocity of change. She lived to be nearly 100, so had gone from that horse-driven subsistence farm life to watching people land on the moon and the eventual digitalization of the world. She commented many times that she had a hard time believing that the same rate of change would occur in the next 100 years after she was gone. I've often wondered what that would look like - you'd almost need colonies on Mars to top what the last 100 years have been like in terms of changes. I suspect that the complete reengineering of our world away from fossil fuels may be that level of disruption and change.
