It seems to me that the progress we are making is in technologies of great generality, computers, AI, and genetics. Once these reach an inflection point, the world will get impossibly weirder than it ever has.<p>Genetically informed iterated embryo selection looks like it could lead to children with higher IQs than any human that has ever lived. Regardless of the ethics, someone somewhere is going to do this. A world where the average kindergartener is learning chromodynamics? Talk about a historical discontinuity.<p>If we get human level artificial intelligence, this again is a historical discontinuity.<p>If we get whole brain emulation, things will get very weird very quickly.<p>We&#x27;re just now getting good VR. False realities that seem real and immersive. This seems like a much bigger jump than that from radio to television.<p>Maybe we are in a period of stagnation - I&#x27;m unsure if this time travel thought experiment is a good means of measuring progress. However, it seems to me the world is about to get much weirder this century.