Progress is already winding down. Deisel engines, airplanes, splitting the atom, computing, antibiotics...all huge but not recent developments. With the exception of the internet, what have we done recently? Maybe human genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks?

Now, we've spent the last few decades refining these ideas, but we're hitting some peaks. How much more efficient can we make an engine? Can we really get off fossil fuels when they're used for everything ranging from fuels to plastics to fertilizers. We've been working on solving cancer for decades and haven't made much progress. We're still nowhere near widespread nuclear fusion and have abandoned nuclear technologies almost altogether outside of the US Navy. Computing is all about shrinking things, but we're starting to hit walls and practical quantum computing still appears to be a distant dream. AI is still nothing like we'd hoped it would be. We're no closer to understanding the brain in a way that would lead to an AGI. More physics research occurs in a matter of months than a decade at the turn of the century. Have we reconciled relativity and quantum mechanics yet? Are we any closer to GUT? I suppose there have been some advanced in our understanding of the universe due to the new instruments we've put into orbit. Nanotechnology is still essentially science fiction outside of some nanotube devices.