Time travel to 2005, and tell someone that now we have any of the following:
Self-driving cars. [0]
Unlimited and free access to all intelligence ever created anytime and anywhere. [1]
Global instantaneous communication by video or message. [2]
Rockets that takeoff and land themselves. [3]
Neural chips that allow paralyzed to control technology with their brains. [4]
Their response would be "not in my lifetime", and if you tell them we would have all five they would say that you are insane.
Now given that this is the reality we live in, you would expect that life would be exponentially better than 20 years ago and we would be doing back flips and loving life, but the world still seems to be... about the same? At minimum things are not what you'd expect from science fiction.
Some sources suggest that happiness has stayed constant with a very slight decrease in the United States [5], and also that we are seeing stagnation and possibly a decrease in human intelligence as well [6] with scores on subjects like Math seeing a decline in the last 10-15 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The interesting thing is that science fiction becomes reality, and then it is expected. So thinking ambitiously seems foolish given that we don't fully grasp how different the world is today. Specifically how much better technology has gotten while humans have stayed largely the same.
For someone like me, it is obvious that when I want a question answered I go to Google and find what I need. It seems unfathomable that I would travel to a library to search for a book and then potentially find some answer there.
Similarly for someone growing up now, I imagine it will be unfathomable to go to Google, search for something specific, look around for a reliable and relevant site and then hopefully find the answer there. Their response is "Why wouldn't you just ask ChatGPT?"
Why wouldn't you just take an autonomous vehicle?
Why wouldn't you use mixed reality to talk to someone on the other side of the world?
Why wouldn't you take a supersonic jet from New York to London?
Why wouldn't rockets just land themselves so they can be reused?
Having a hyper-optimistic view of technology always sounds crazy, but historically you are even crazier to take the opposite stance. Because technology is science fiction, then reality, and then expected.
Context
[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/year-in-review-2024
[1] https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092227/facebook-product-dau/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYUr-5PYA7s
[4] https://x.com/neuralink/status/1791208277327438004/video/1
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
[6] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38