He is great, but how to put it politely? His enthusiasm for technology and future possibilities blinds him to the reality that many things take longer than what we would wish , and that science requires lot of sluggish, dull work in order to advance.
While this is true, one thing that has changed a lot is how connected all the research labs of the world are across the planet and how that rate is increasing. While it creates a lot of chaos, distraction and trust issues to work through, the scope and scale of collaboration is on the rise which means a lot of work is getting parallelized.
Think of it as a shift from single core to multicore. Dull stuff is going to happen faster than it used too.
It takes time to adjust to hyperconnection. But the benefits will keep showing up and pushing things in the direction of more connection. Look at the number of collaborators on the Black Hole image or gravitational wave detection. You will see things like that increase. And as they increase we learn how to do things better.
