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* We can expect to live longer than our parents, and our children longer than us
* Diseases continue to disappear as public health measures are developed and new vaccines are introduced
* We have the Internet, which puts the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, connects us with people with whom we never could before, and allows the delivery of services undreamt.
* Stuff is cheaper. We spend less of our income on food, clothes, and housing and can invest much more in education and healthcare
* Productivity continues to rise. Output per labor hour remains on an upward trend.
* New productivity tools are invented that used to be the stuff of science fiction. That gadget in your hand used to only be a telephone, and now it's a computer that used to take up the size of a room. And virtually everyone can afford one.
* We're more energy-efficient than ever. Economic output per unit energy continues to rise.
* Despite deniers' best efforts, global warming is an existential threat, and people are rising to meet it. Soon enough solar will be cheaper even than subsidized coal, just as natural gas has become in the USA.
* Best of all, there are more scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, and researchers alive now than at any other time on earth. More people are in school, and more complete secondary and pursue post-secondary education than ever. Not only are we smarter, but we're making ourselves even smarter than that.
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Concur with all of this, with erratic dips here and there: I don't see all of these improving with straight consistency in the future. But I'll be the parade-rainer briefly.
Humanity, despite its longevity and incremental prosperity (I don't mean financially), will continue to fail if there's no effective way to eliminate selfishness.
Will humanity ever get on the same page? Probably not. But amazingly we have hurdled closer to equalization; technology has brought upon us more connectivity. Just, there's always that dissent. One wanting more than another. One's idea not lining up with another's idea. Unless we experience a Ray Kurzweil-ian-like virtual utopia (in the far, far future: I wouldn't guess we'll see a technological singularity in 2049 as predicted) where all's desires and whims are satiated within one's self-contained environment, forget it. Funnily enough, I have a whisper of optimism about it all. Just barely.
And, there's also the obvious: will we become transhumanist enough to flout death? Will we ever develop a means of restoring consciousness in the dead? While currently no empirical measures would suggest the possibility, I take small solace in the fact that there's always been technology or ideas that sprout up that were previously thought to be impossible. It still happens regularly.