That's where Peter Thiel screwed up in his pessimistic premise about flying cars vs tweets (used as an illustractive example of course).

At the same time Thiel was making that claim, CRISPR, AI, robotics, VR/AR, blockchain/crypto-currencies and a massive general leap in automation were working their way into the economy. We're also about to take a leap forward when it comes to space tech and transportation improvements (from electric vehicles, electric planes, to hyper-loop and subterranean tunnel transport, those are all likely only the beginning of a new generation of transport tech; the power of combining electric vehicles + radically better software + lower cost, will be vast and will remake every nation). To add to all of that, China throws a big X factor into the global economy, they'll add additional spark to invention/innovation, accelerating competition and improvement between the US-Europe-Asia (Thiel's observations apply primarily to a time range when China was dirt poor, as recently as 1994 they had a mere $500b in GDP).

What's more important, flying cars (which are wildly impractical even if you can do it well), or curing Hepatitis C? We did the latter at the same time Thiel was expressing his pessimism. At least 70 million people have Hepatitis C world-wide. Flying cars are a joke by comparison to the extraordinary scientific accomplishment of wiping out HepC over the next two decades. Thiel set up his bold premise at exactly the wrong time.

Most of those innovations however seem to be playing "catch-up" though and there's a huge question mark as to whether most (not necessarily all) of the benefit goes to capital holders. Even the innovations that do benefit as a percentage how much do they lift living standards by compared to innovations of old? Electricity meant I had light at night; think of your local neighborhood without sewerage, etc.

They are also "costing a lot more" in terms of training and intelligence so there's a question mark of how much the average person without capital or privilege can access them. For me there's also a question of whether they are just playing catch up for increase in human population that's happened since the WW2 era - how many are not required if we just reduce population? Per capita are we really better of? There's a reason a lot of people are "nostalgic" for the period before the 1990's. There's also the negative things to consider of all this "innovation" such as environmental degradation, the massive increase in CO2 emissions, etc.

The "stagnant" economy (e.g food, land, health care) - the things most people need to survive comfortably have been increasing in cost significantly for most world economies. The innovations you state most of the world's population (who are mostly poor btw) would happily trade away for cheap more nutrient rich food, house, cheaper energy, etc.

Not saying hyperloops, blockchains and such aren't cool; I'm just questioning whether technology alone is what improves our quality of life. And all technology requires energy which is generally increasing in cost.

There's quite a bit on the horizon with potential to reshape society. Self-driving cars is perhaps the most obvious example, and the underlying technologies of computer vision and deep learning seem likely cause automation revolutions in a number of other fields.