So, AI allowing us to speak with animals, people being able to communicate telepathically, people able to live entirely in their own VR worlds?

At best, those are pipedreams, at worst they are bullshit sales pitches that will either never happen for products that can't possibly work safely or as imagined.

You can't talk to animals if they don't even have their own languages.

Telepathy? As in mind to mind direct interface? Sure, talk to the people with exoskeletons or bionic eyes that can no longer be hardware or software maintained. Or you know all the Neurolink monkies and pigs that went insane and died of infection or bashing their heads into walls until they killed themselves.

... Or you could just text things to people or call them.

Live entirely in a VR world? Sure, there's two ways to almost do that:

1. Be extraordinarily wealthy such that you can afford butlers and a home that you never need to leave.

2. Oh you're poor? Well you can remote operate an android and be a robot butler or industrial worker.

...

From my point of view, there has been technological progress, but very little of it is aimed at meaningfully improving the average person's life, introducing some game changing systemic, society spanning thing that makes some very important, very costly thing, far far less expensive... in about a decade or so.

We got to the point where basically any office job can be done remotely... and nope, can't switch to a remote work paradigm because then commercial real estate market collapses and middle managers don't need to exist anymore.

We've had EVs for a while now... turns out their only marginally better for the environment, and more expensive. The real needed change is a switch to whoah remote working, combined with redesigning cities to have more extensive mass transit.

I don't know if you've played Stellaris, but in that game you have 3 simultaneous tech trees: Societal, Engineering, and Theoretical Physics.

In the last two decades we've made progress in the latter, and basically none in the former.

Well, we have the science to back up things like better social safety nets, UBI, better work life balance, reliable and affordable healthcare.... but we don't implement it.

Technology can drive politics, and politics can drive technology.

Our politics are capitalist. Tech is basically only implemented toward increasing profit. And almost always only in the short term. And almost always as cost saving measures, instead of actually improving a product.

Innovation feels like its being forced on us... because it is. Top Down. Adapt or Die. And... that's not really innovation anyway.

We could live in a social order that treats employees as investments, trains them, pays for that training.

Instead, we are costs. We are disposable. Its up to us to keep learning on our own time and dime, even though literally no one has any idea what specific skills will be needed next.

... I'm getting a bit rambly here, but my basic point is that we haven't had any meaningful major breakthroughs that improve the common person's life in a while.

Everything meaningful and new is aimed at the wealthy or ultra wealthy, as consumers, or as owners.

Everything else is 'pay in time or money to learn or use this new system or standard or else you're unemployable.'

If we did somehow invent a groundbreaking invention, like humanoid automatons with their own, self contained, ability to replace most human workers... the wealthy would just stop employing us, let us die.