Exponential tech bringing us to a singularity was never happening. We had at least two tremendous breakthroughs in technologies that act as enablers and multip

Exponential tech bringing us to a singularity was never happening. We had at least two tremendous breakthroughs in technologies that act as enablers and multipliers for other technologies since the last industrial revolution. The first was figuring out how to store, transport, and use energy. We lucked out a bit on the very existence of fossil fuels and then made an all-time great physics breakthrough discovering nuclear fission and fusion. All of these are limited by storage capacity and transmission bandwidth, and once the road and wiring infrastructure was in place, there isn't a whole lot more than incremental improvements to be had. The other paradigm shift we seemed tantalizing close to was Tesla trying to develop wireless energy transmission, but it never happened. The second was electronic computing. When we figured out we could use transistors to print computers onto increasingly smaller circuit boards, that unlocked decades upon decades of rapid scaling potential that we have mostly done a great job of continually realizing. Computational signal transmission, unlike energy transmission, actually works fine without wires, which enabled mobile and grid computing and build out of massive richly connected networks. These aren't going to unlock singularities, though. If we're only looking for advances in energy and computing, then yeah, of course, those were going to slow down at some point compared to when we found major paradigm shifts like transistors and fossil fuels. Wireless energy transmission and cold fusion are probably the two holy grails that could make a lot of other stuff happen, but we have no idea if they're really possible, and the past few decades of "our greatest minds are focused on how to price a CDO" shifting to "our greatest minds are figuring out how to get people to click on ads" probably isn't helping. Without the commercial incentive, research to enable larger breakthroughs probably has to come from governments, but making better governments isn't in the purview of technology. As others have mentioned, we don't have the world wars, space race, and cold war to motivate us any more. Maybe a greater US/China rivalry can actually rekindle governments that fund important basic research? There are other obvious enablers we need beyond energy and computing, too. Transportation is one. I don't think we've made any major breakthroughs here since the automobile and airplane were invented. Widespread work from home and remote collaboration could probably go a long way toward solving this problem by doing an end-around and making people not need to move as much rather than figuring out better ways to move them. Food production is another. Healthcare is another. Our greatest sci-fi imagines teleportation, splicing apart air molecules and putting together protein and carbohydrates, and immunity from all diseases and possible curing aging. Are those really possible? Who knows, but again, it'll take a lot of commercially unviable, largely failed, basic research to even figure this out. Thousands of people will need to spend many decades of career time, possibly entire lifetimes, achieving nothing so that one person can achieve a breakthrough. And, at some point, we need to figure out how to keep an exponentially growing population housed and productively occupied. That isn't a technological problem. We have the tech right now to give everyone their own cubbyhole and coloring book, but humans want more than that.