Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress, with leaps so large they are almost impossible to imagine by pre

Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress, with leaps so large they are almost impossible to imagine by previous generations. Imagine telling someone from the era of ocean liners that in less than a century, his descendants would be routinely flying across continents in hours for the price of a few meals, with safety levels so high it is massively more dangerous for them to take a taxi to work. Imagine the surprise of the world upon discovering nuclear weapons in 1945, the hope that came from knowing it was a clean and seemingly endless source of power. Or look at Asimov: he was a prescient writer in many respects, probably one of the if not the greatest SF writer there was, but his works completely ignore the connectivity that is pervasive today (when the NSA taps every phone and reads every email automatically, when they can recognize your face even turned, from a million CCTV cameras whose feed is parsed in real time, you can't have plots with people running away in cities undetected). The most exciting part of working in technology in general, and software in particular, is that you get to be at - or at least better understand - the cutting edge and see those changes before they become more broadly accepted. For example, machine translation used to be cutting edge AI research in top secret intelligence projects, yet today you can translate entire webpages in Chrome with right click -> "Translate to English". For free. Hell, your portable Star Trek-like computer can take a photo of the Japanese menu for you and convert it to something understandable, then translate your response back to Japanese for your waiter. The Babel Fish is real! Given a bit more time, some better brain-computer interfaces and a larger corpus, we might well be able to converse in any language without learning it... Software is this generation's equivalent to steels and mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear weapons and power in the 20th century - we have conquered the physical realm pretty thoroughly but have only made baby steps in knowledge compared to what is possible. Even neuroscientists will admit we know relatively little about how the brain really works. Just look at statistical learning: the field has only really blossomed in the last 15 years or so. The reason for proprietary software and IP is always the same: to generate via extremely expensive R&D leaps in knowledge and products that allow the researching company to reap outsized returns. Yesterday, it was operating systems and office suites. Today, it's applications that need things like massive GPU clusters for deep learning, or knowing how to scale complex services (like Google Image Search) to billions of users, or weak AI (self-driving cars). I would love nothing more than a glimpse to the technology of 2060 or 2600, although I doubt I would be able to grasp even a fraction of what it represents. Just knowing the problems they are trying to solve then, would be fascinating.