[coldtea]

>If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way

There's no "rapid acceleration of progress". If anything there's a decline, and even an economic decline.

Take away the financial bubbles based on deregulation and huge explosion of debt, and the last 40 years of "economic progress" are just a mirage filling a huge bubble with air in actual advancement terms - unlike the previous millenia.

[azan_]

That’s completely wrong. There was barely any progress in previous millennia. There was even economic Nobel prize for showing why!

[coldtea]

The GDP per capita of the world has been slowly increasing for several millenia. Same for the advancements in core technology.

The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age, vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece, and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).

Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.

[inglor_cz]

If you got a random cancer in 1970, your chances of survival would be only somewhat better than during the Roman Empire, so slightly better than zero, but not very much so. Even Hodgkin's lymphoma, nowadays a very manageable disease, was reliably deadly.

In 2026, unless you are really lucky your chances of being treated into remission are much better. That is a meaningful improvement.

Medical science made a HUGE progress in the last 50 years alone. The oldest IVF baby is not even fifty yet.

[azan_]

> Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.

Of course it does. It would be good if you would try to actually support such controversial claims with data.

[pixl97]

Lol, wut?

The world can produce more things cheaper and faster than ever and this is an economic decline? I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.

[coldtea]

>I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.

I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive improvements in your quality of life" if you start from merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or colonial India.

Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.

[pixl97]

And yet in the US I can currently survive and illness by the means of technology where I would have died in the 70s. It can be really hard to see the forest from the trees when everything around us is rapidly changing technology.

Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop us from increased housing density in a lot of places too. Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and made expensive because of it.