It may not be too controversial to claim that we live in an evil world. To us outsiders, it also seems unreal. There can be a flatness of affect, like a hollow outline, or a recording you can't influence. Society seems to be slowing down faster than CPUs are speeding up.
To me, the most evil people in the world have always been the world's computer programmers. Not because of what they do, but because they do it so incredibly badly, inflicting endless pain in such apparently deliberate ways. So far, I have no option but to conclude they are evil.
But most people are surprisingly (perhaps incomprensibly) tolerant to such things.
A social slowdown was first noticed in the 1970s by SF fans in California, dreaming of Manhattan-sized orbital cylinders and cryonic immortality. They actually hoped to buy space condos in their lifetimes. But something went wrong. After years of accelerating improvement, technological progress seemed to be slowing down.
They could at least have built a prototype swing-wing Boeing 2707, even if it burned too much fuel to carry passengers.
By the mid-1990s, it was realized such dreams may be delusions. All those cool gadgets, settings, and scenes from scifi movies may never become real. Turnaround attempts in that decade (X-33, DC-X, Venturestar) inspired successes in the 2000s. But there may never be another supersonic airliner, a large space station or space colony, or starships. In the long run, there may be no human beings.
The future will be all virtual. This can be a good thing. The most important breakthrough may be (still-undiscovered) mind extension software. That naturally leads to mind backup.
The most spectacular age of human progress was a historical anomaly. Not that long ago, old folks recalled riding to school on horseback. Today they recall driving on the moon.
Sixty years ago, the most modern passenger airliner was the Boeing 707, which looked rather like today's 787 (which took much longer to get certified).
Every year there was a bit less progress solving cancer and heart disease, while costs balloon higher. There has been negative progress in appetite control (that might require an unhackable fridge/pantry with timer-operated food dispenser, or rationed pleasure drugs to compensate for hunger) or in depression control, or in insomnia research.
True Artificial Intelligence still awaits the last mind-blowing breakthrough. A unified field theory of physics seems more remote than during Einstein's last years.
The advanced F-22 fighter jet took four decades of development.
The space shuttle was to be replaced with two types of somewhat improved Apollo capsules (not ready as of 2023). Until 2020, US astronauts used basically the same rocket that had launched the first Sputnik over sixty years earlier.
There's been little progress in alternative energy and no real progress yet in fusion power.
The worst scandal: education remained as agonizing as always, and immensely more bureaucratic and expensive.
Improvements slowed in non-computer fields. Even then the increase in microchip capacity remains unmatched by any operating system improvements.
Soon, that will be all that matters.
Did we miss something important?
Perhaps an easy method to manufacture diamond compounds as early as in the nineteenth century. The first moon landing could have occurred by 1930. There might conceivably be simple ways to generate antigravity, or reactionless thrust.
Hot air balloons, the laws of perspective, plastics could have been invented thousands of years earlier, changing all of history.
More important, the sciences of awareness and society have been utterly neglected. These things fall outside the scientific way of doing things.
One symptom is the end of 'hard SF' stories, like by Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven. Kindles filled up with fantasy novels. New SF is not about science but characters and social mores and style. It's respectable literature about losers losing.
At least some fiction should try to explain reality. This can only be done by describing reality from the outside, the opposite of what literature has become. SF should be about rejecting the present world, instead of empowering it by wallowing in social afflictions.
They don't make good idea movies about extreme science anymore. The last one may have been Terminator 2 (thanks to the T-1000), though there are many good fantasy films. Lord of the Rings is probably more plausible than Star Wars, Matrix, or even Interstellar.
Superhero movies suck worst of all. The existence of superpowers should signal a paradigm shift, making normal people irrelevant, but they can't transcend their genre. Science writers could invent somewhat plausible explanations (Many-Worlds quantum feedback to explain superhuman reactions), but directors don't want anything complicated.
One reason why progress has slowed is that people don't fear the unknown, but are annoyed at having to think about complicated things, as seen in the ban on nuclear power.
By the late 2030s, people could have all the fun, excitement and adventure they want in virtual reality, and create paradise there. Or things could go wrong in ways too horrible to imagine.
Ultimately, the only real problem is the problem of pain, which is the problem of involuntary existence.
Read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
The book that took a quarter century to write.
More original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Mysterious source of the Anonymous meme.
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