Life now is clearly better and more interesting than it was 100 years ago. But the pace of innovation is much, much slower. 100 years ago cars, household electricity and recorded sound were all brand new. Every one of these things represents a huge leap forward, giving mankind entirely new capabilities. And all of them were developed and brought to market in the same 20-30 year period.
What have we produced in the last 20-30 years that's even close to providing that kind of new capability? The only recent innovation on that level is TCP/IP, and we've been iterating on that ever since.
"Things are good now" is never a reason to not get better. We've gotten very good at making incremental improvements, but fallen way behind on the pace of breakthrough innovation.
Wireless global communications for the masses is an enormous leap forward.
Cars and planes let me easily move 1500 miles away from where I grew up. And then modern communication technology and video/audio compression lets me communicate, with video, in real time with people back there, from anywhere I go with phone coverage. That's pretty damn significant.
The author of the original article is basically also assuming that none of the interesting things that are currently being researched are going to amount to anything. It's a bizarre mix of sampling problems, observational biases, and cynicism.
Edit: I thought of another pretty huge one: imaging, especially medically (look at how much less invasive many surgical procedures are now than they were 30 years ago), but also for stuff like mapping. We now have collections of images taken from airplanes and satellites of most (all?) of the world. When has that kind of information ever been available in the past? What kind of cool stuff will we be able to do in the next twenty years with all this information that has only seen widespread availability in the last ten years or so?
And then there are the medical procedures that weren't even possible thirty years ago...
What have we produced in the last 20-30 years that's even close to providing that kind of new capability? The only recent innovation on that level is TCP/IP, and we've been iterating on that ever since.
"Things are good now" is never a reason to not get better. We've gotten very good at making incremental improvements, but fallen way behind on the pace of breakthrough innovation.