The world has seen absolutely no meaningful technological progress in my lifetime - all we've had are faster and smaller computers, bigger networks, slightly more efficient machines and medicines. No true breakthroughs, no world-changing discoveries.

It raises the question - are the barriers to advancement intrinsic or extrinsic? Is it something we are doing wrong as a society, or have we simply plucked all the low-hanging fruit available to us? Have we hit a natural or artificial plateau?

The sciences have certainly become highly moribund, but its very hard to demonstrate causation - if we HAD hit an inherent barrier to further advancement, it would make sense that resources would end up going to making small evolutionary improvements to existing frameworks.

A number of people have made this point, but I think they're missing the fact that there's a difference between building on previous achievements and living off them. Stagnation often looks like continued success on the surface. https://twitter.com/FakeMontanan/status/1264682615413637129?s=20

Lots of people have also listed inventions that they tell me will change the world within my lifetime. That may be true, but if I'm right I would expect such advances to go un- or under-utilised. I suspect we may see the usual over-promising and under-delivering.

Worth noting that Tyler Cowen's 'The Great Stagnation' came out nearly ten years ago and so far it looks pretty prophetic https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/13/will-hutton-innovation-must-be-encouraged

This is another point that has cropped up a lot, and the comments about ignoring gradual evolution have big assumptions baked in. Evolution actually tends towards gradual stasis, it takes dramatic environmental shifts to produce evolutionary leaps. https://twitter.com/reyrythesciguy/status/1264933934137085952?s=20

I suspect it's not a coincidence that we're still living off of breakthroughs made in the early (war-torn) half of the 20th century, and that once Soviet and American competition cooled space exploration withered away. Instead we have intensifications of market friendly tech.

Another striking feature of the critical responses is the overwhelming emphasis on personal ease, convenience, comfort, safety etc. Not that these are necessarily to be sneered at but where is the romantic, heroic account of science in all this?

Science has gone from a Nietzschean religion of the superman to being a post-Nietzschean religion of the last man. Of course the latter is the outcome of the former.