"and the more information we have, the more likely we are to be able to extrapolate our capabilities"
I don't believe that. Major progress usually comes from entirely new technologies, not from continuous development of the already known ones.
You wouldn't be able to extrapolate current IT sector from the state of things in 1924, because the transistor, the crucial building block for really heavy computation, wasn't around.
Same with people in 1824 trying to predict current civil aviation from their state-of-the-art balloons.
There's a lot of extrapolation going on already. It's like if you speculated an evil demon as running a VR simulation in the year 1900, more powerful than current computers. No knowledge of transistors needed. On the level of math and physics, there are new discoveries, but they don't come that often for the kind of thing big enough to help in this case.
You could have used that line about extrapolating our future at any point in history, and it would have been wrong each time. So I don't think it will be right now.
Well, [checks watch] it's 2024 so I'll just jetpack over and up to the parking lot, and drive my flying car home, and catch the 2nd week of the Moon Olympics.
It'd be nice, but you know what, let's look after what we have, and if we get to Star Trek, that's fine, but if we don't we still have somewhere to live.
I don't believe that. Major progress usually comes from entirely new technologies, not from continuous development of the already known ones.
You wouldn't be able to extrapolate current IT sector from the state of things in 1924, because the transistor, the crucial building block for really heavy computation, wasn't around.
Same with people in 1824 trying to predict current civil aviation from their state-of-the-art balloons.