I've often wondered if countries (such as maybe China or India) where medical devices/pharmaceuticals/etc are more lightly regulated may some day end up pulling ahead of countries like the US with stricter regulations.
Of course, stricter regulations exist for a reason – to reduce incidence of death or injury from insufficiently tested treatments. But, there is always a risk-reward tradeoff–being willing to tolerate a greater incidence of death/injury due to new treatments may increase the progress of medical science–and some societies may collectively decide to locate that tradeoff at a different position than what the US (or even other Western countries) does.
... Or you know large scale existential crisis. Nanotechnology is freaky man. Could be the easiest way for reality to be rewritten without anyone noticing..
obtaining regulatory approval for innovations in various spheres (medicine, aviation) takes forever
If regulatory approval is the real bottleneck then there would be a rapidly-growing backlog of technologies that have been invented but not approved. Do we see that?
people wanting to use their present purchases for some amount of time before shelling out again for the next generation of tech
People are keeping iPhones for 4-5 years instead of 2 years but Apple still has enough R&D budget to release a new model every year.
The reality is that most codebases are brittle and bug-ridden. Poor reliability is one the defining characteristics of software systems.
The most reliable systems require formal methods, which require a nailed-down spec. There is no nailed-down spec for an open-ended self-improving system, and it's debatable if a spec is even possible.
So the only practical systems will be heuristic and inherently unreliable in at least some domains, with a tendency to fail spectacularly - much like humans.
This is a basic limitation of technology. You can have mechanical perfection in a limited domain (although with software you often you get a poor imitation of that) or you can trade off flexibility for reliability.
You can't have both.
And probably for very good reasons.
All our current medical technologies a way to late to the party, if anything else we should've have them 50 years ago.
In addition many things require experiments or building large scale factories/businesses and those take time.
An exponentially faster development of technology is limited by how fast the workings of government agencies and consumers' minds operate.
I rolled my eyes when I read Kurzweil's predictions of medical advances in his early-millennium books. Even if we invent nanobots or whatever so quickly, the FDA and its counterparts are not going to allow applying those technologies the very moment they are invented.