No, there's just too much potential. Look at what falling launch costs to space has opened the door to alone and you can see there's a ton of sick shit on the horizon and that's just one thing rather than when we bring stuff together. I know it's not cool to be an Elon Musk fan but he saw a problem holding us back and solved it, imagine how many more of those hurdles we've yet to cross.

There's a certain strand of utopian thought you have to avoid in millennialism but on the opposite end it just reminds me of how people in the 19th century assumed that all that was left for humanity was cataloguing. Both ends ultimately feel like the expression of a lack of imagination for me. A failure at the very least to appreciate the black swans and how our own limited perspective can't appreciate change - just ask a parent trying to understand their kids generation.

>That Frankie Fukushima fella said we (or at least the west) reached the end of history in the sense that we've settled on a "final", least worst political system.

There's a bit of nuance in that given people miss the question mark. At any rate he's obviously more cynical these days and increasingly talking about a circular history where everything is just rehashed:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/18/fukuyama-end-of-history-capitol-violence-democracy/

I think he's wrong for my part. It's not that we're trapped in an endless circle of sameness but that political ideology moves at a glacial pace that only really starts running with a convolution of forces finally coming together. The big change at the moment is the rise of civilization states (China, Russia, EU) as opposed to the nation or the state which currently lacks coherent and new ideological underpinnings, but we forget that ideology usually follows reality as an explanatory note.

I feel like a dick for disagreeing with your whole premise though; you could instead have fun with the question of whether maths is invented or discovered. Really are we inventing anything new in the big picture?

>>27748
In computer technology - perhaps - we will need quantum to come along before we see the next dramatic shift in computing power and capability.

In things like medical technology, DNA or genetic manipulation (facilitated by computer technology) - nowhere near.

No, but I believe we have plat... Plate.. Plateaued? Into what may prove to be a dominant paradigm for some time. If the 50s to 00s were defined by sitting in front of the telly or talking over the phone, the last decade and presumably the next several will be defined by prodding at our Devices.

Innovation will continue obviously, but in smaller and less visible ways. But I also think we tend to overestimate just how advanced we are- We've really only just gotten over trepanning and burning people at the stake, in the grand scheme of things. There is undoubtedly further to go, but like anything, it's an exponential curve, where the further we develop the more effort and specialisation and knowledge it takes to develop further.

I feel like that old chestnut, Capitalism, in its current iteration is holding us back a little. Things that are not immediately profitable are less explored, with only the likes of Musk holding the torch for things like space exploration which we had previously seen great progress in.

>Do either of you two feel like we've reached a kind of technological end point?

No. We're right on the cusp of the sustainable energy revolution, with solar panels beating coal on cost and electric cars coming within reach of normal families. We're making absolutely wild advances in biotech, as exemplified by the rapid development of the covid vaccines. AI is eating everything and what looked like the end of Moore's Law is turning into a renaissance in chip architecture.

The economist Tyler Cowen wrote two books on the theme of "the great stagnation", his hypothesis that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked; he is now arguing that the great stagnation is over, in part due to the massive disruptions to business and working habits caused by covid.

An obvious example is video conferencing and remote working. We'd been talking about it for years, the technology all worked pretty well, but the institutional inertia of office culture maintained the status quo until covid forced everyone to give it a go. In a matter of months, the virtual office has gone from pie-in-the-sky to common sense.

There will be no "going back to normal", because normal is over.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/why-did-the-great-stagnation-end.html

>>27752
>We're right on the cusp of the sustainable energy revolution, with solar panels beating coal on cost and electric cars coming within reach of normal families.
This won't look like change. To the man on the Clapham Omnibus it'll just be a continuation of his home having electricity and there being cars around.
>We're making absolutely wild advances in biotech, as exemplified by the rapid development of the covid vaccines.
Again, this "advance" just lets us maintain the normal better.

AI may be a wild card but again it may not.
So technology is moving but it doesn't feel like it is.
That's probably always the case though, relative to a human life-span it's unusual for the macro to change so quickly that you feel it happening.

I think this was a rather silly supposition to make, OP. That quote you have posted seems to be from someone silly enough to think the media sensationalising science news is a comment on technological advancement and not the media itself.

We are on the edge of being able to inject virus that can reprogram your DNA sequence, reusable rockets that will make space travel affordable and augmented reality adoption is only a question of marketing it right and you think we already reached the end of history? were you dropped on your head as a baby.

>>27753
>Again, this "advance" just lets us maintain the normal better.

This really depends on what the "normal" means, for you. If the normal is just "able to produce a vaccine", then yes in a very broad sense, you're right, but the speed at which the vaccine was made was dependant on plenty of technology and processes that did not exist just a few years ago; mRNA vaccines were tested in animals from the 1990s, there was a lot of excitement and companies being built around it for human use in the 2000s and 2010s, but nothing really came to fruition until 2020.

Other recent biotech breakthroughs include CRISPR. Though the acronym strictly refers to understanding a pattern in DNA, it's usually used synonymously with Cas9 or CRISPR-Cas9, a new technology allowing us to edit genes within organisms.

I would say that, based on CRISPR alone, we are going to see some pretty wild and unexpected advances.

>>27756
>if the normal is just "able to produce a vaccine", then yes in a very broad sense, you're right
I mean that the ability to produce the vaccine means we go back to "business as usual" faster. All these advances are just used to maintain the more general status quo.

>>27756 pretty wild and unexpected advances.

Some of which will be advances in inconvenient directions, but yes.

If we can get some advances in small scale, low energy water treatment so I can properly go unabomber (without the actual bombing bit), that would be a blessing.

You seem to be searching for some great shift when the reason we are where we are is because we have collectively tried to suit our desires.