Is that really still true in the world we live in today though? Previously we were unable to instantly share information so freely and collaborate with people around the world with so little effort.
I'm not saying it shouldn't take time to develop these things, but surely the 30-40 year timeline is significantly reduced due to information sharing today?
I'd question the 30-40 years figure. I suspect "it depends".
Check out the book "Skunk Works" sometime and marvel at what they managed to do on the frontiers with such small numbers of people and crappy computers (with relatively small budgets and tight deadlines to boot).
Peter Thiel riffs on this idea a lot. Despite our incredible advances in computing and networks, it seems like progress in everything else has slowed down. (Randomly found video with his basic stack of points: http://bigthink.com/embeds/video_idea/48434?width=512&height...)
Another example, consider how long it takes to build any skyscraper in the US. This isn't even new tech, it's well understood, but it still takes a long time from planning to legal stuff to the actual construction. And yet there's a guy in China who builds other kinds of skyscrapers at a rate of two floors per day. Slowness is not a fundamental thing.
Indeed; I would assume a big part of the bureaucratic layer exists to make everything work mostly correct even though there will be cheaters and thieves at every stage of the construction process.
I'm sure it's faster now due to reasons you're describing. Also, cold war is gone - so that kind of helps too. Thing is, this isn't your average ruby on rails app and JSON API. Applied research in chemistry, physics, and industrial scale production takes certain breakthroughs, test methodologies, etc. all of which take a lot of talent and money. From what I remember we've seen significant (for certain amounts of significant) funding in applied r&d for graphene around the same time Nobel was won for it in 2010. So, even if r&d is accelerated now significantly, we're still probably at least around 10-20 years away from seeing anything utilising it in a significant and widespread manner.
That speed should be much faster now due to the information age and globalized competition. It may not approach Ray Kurzweil's predictions, but it's certainly shorter than previous generations of commercialization.
E.g. look at how long it took to develop digital cameras, flat screen TVs, etc.