Why don't have any contracts signed with nature on infinite progress. Or that any desired progress will be timely.

We might never be able to pass some local maxima.

Or we might go extinct, or go back to barbarism after a few good wars of famines, before we get to solve some problems.

Or it might take 50 or 100 years in the future to do so.

We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants, flying cars, space colonies, or general AI -- all things that were considered (by experts nonetheless) "just around the corner" in the 60s.

And don't get me started on mass market holographic storage and memsistors...

The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn't see further than a mechanised version of what they already had. On the face of it a robot is a replacement for a physical person, but the reality is that the physical person bit is what's unnecessary. Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible. What was needed was to distill the tasks down to the absolute minimum and then automate that, and that's what we've got now. We automated the physical side of posting a letter and now we have email. We automated filing by using databases instead. Scheduling meetings is now done using shared calendars.

Automation of jobs is not about making a machine that does the job of a person. It's about removing the person and building systems to replace the processes that person did.

We do have robot assistants. They just don't look like robots.

I'm not so sure. A robot assistant would be very much desired by thousands, as a general replacement for another human (e.g. domestic server, personal trainer, bud to play tennis with, arbitrary help around the house, and don't get my started on sexbots).

>* Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible.*

That might be so, but humans are not factories, and a nice general help anthropomorphic robot would still be very much appreciated. The same way general AI is the holy grail considered to 10000 dedicated processors that can play chess or translate for you.

It's amazing how people are ready to throw capitalism and scientific advancement out of the window because of where advancement might be headed at some distant point in the future.

Let me know when unemployment shows a trend of rising over the long term because people can't find new lines of work. Then let's talk about putting UBI or other draconian measures in place.

Notice the world "headed" -- it's as if it's all out of human control, and the best they should do is strap in for the ride, to whatever it is.

What you characterized as "amazing" can also be described with words like precaution or prudence.

Then again, maybe tax cuts allowed private companies to get us further than where we would have been if we had spent ever-more money on government. Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years.

When they gave up the ghost they weren't that behind. And when they started operations back in 1917, they were vastly behind the US. Plus they got to space (and tons of other space related things) first.

So there's that...

Not to mention the plethora of government funded stuff we take for granted in the West as well -- the internet (ARPA) and the web (CERN) for starters...

(And most of early computing, also heavily subsidized)

There's a reason the USSR felt the need to construct Potemkin villages.

Luckily the demand for programming has so far outstripped any productivity enhancements.

Most CRUD applications could be about 90% defined by filling in data dictionaries (tables describing tables). However, trends & fads, mostly UI fads, keep mucking up the details of the implementation. Sometimes UI-related trends are good, but a good many are just wasteful fads. Bosses, users, and customers like shiny fancy dancy new things. Vulcans would puke.

Fads are great for creating jobs because they keep moving the goal-post: often being different JUST to be different; but fads are lousy from a pure efficiency standpoint. Humans are still apes who follow the shiny red things.