I'd add a growing awareness of and concern for the environment. The United States had its "Moore's Law" era for nuclear technology for about 20 years after WW II. After that, concern about weapons test fallout and other environmental releases of radionuclides made experiments much slower and more expensive. To the extent that many ideas never left the drawing board.
There are similar stories with chemical technology, manufacturing, even electricity generation. Fossil fuel depletion is one example of overtaxed sources. Strontium 90 in human teeth, acid rain, phosphate driven algal blooms, etc. are emblematic of overtaxed sinks. The US circa 1960 enjoyed a faster-than-sustainable pace of development (scientific and technological) by borrowing from the future on multiple axes.
I didn't want to head down that rabbit hole, but there are a few lines of argument which lead to the conclusion that the end-stage of most technologies involves both ever-diminishing positive returns and an increased concern in dealing with unintended consequences. I call these "hygiene factors", though environmental concerns would certainly be a prime example.
One framing of this looks at the mechanisms by which technologies achieve results. I've identified nine of these: fuels, materials, energy & power transmission and transformation, technical knowledge ("technology"), causal knowledge ("science"), networks, systems, information, and hygiene. These seem reasonably well-defined.
The area of accelerating rates of returns seems specific to network / dendritic structures (physical, conceptual, or both). Even here, growth ultimately slows, probably best considered governed by a logistic function.
There are similar stories with chemical technology, manufacturing, even electricity generation. Fossil fuel depletion is one example of overtaxed sources. Strontium 90 in human teeth, acid rain, phosphate driven algal blooms, etc. are emblematic of overtaxed sinks. The US circa 1960 enjoyed a faster-than-sustainable pace of development (scientific and technological) by borrowing from the future on multiple axes.