Technology

You're taking like the intent didn't totally change the world in just about every way. Even in your list of big ideas that didn't make it you can't help but pick something that totally changed the world. You could have been more honest about the fifties where it was electrification everyone was hyped about which brought the white goods revolution and diy era. There's a good argument to be made that the civil rights era was only made possible by the extra time labour saving devices made in the household.

Then there's the television which brought education and culture to the masses, people said it would be huge but they were vastly understating what would happen. Computers were the big dream of the 70s but again totally smashed almost all expectations, almost nothing we take for granted today would be possible without computers. Then the 80s we had internet hype, it was pretty shitty bbs and newsgroups but people again predicted huge things that don't even come close to what we're used to now. 90s was mobile tech and iot which again I don't even need to say anything about how huge that has become. Now we're really starting to see the realization of AI research and automation but it's very early stuff, you're not casually chatting to your computer to narrow down product searches or having it design custom parts for you car based on vague descriptions but you will be and you'll take it for granted just like you do with every other huge development.

Ai might not ever create anything interesting on its own but by allowing people to turn their ideas into reality it's going to unlock unprecedented levels of human creativity. That said I think we'll have genuinely novel expression created with intent and structure, unless you want to bring God into it there's no reason a machine can't to anything we can