Yeah, internet, sliced bread and all that are great. But flying cars and a cure for AIDS would have been nice too.
My point is that in the '80s there was a lot of optimism about humankind's capabilities, people were saying "it's not a question of what CAN we do anymore, it is what SHOULD we do", implying we COULD do anything. I believed that at the time, but have grown increasingly skeptical (and I blame the brain drain away from science and into zero-sum games like finance for not fulfilling our potential).
We can do everything we want, just not in 5 years. It took thousands of years to get from living in caves to having a steam machine, and a fraction of that to where we are now. The next 30 years are going to be awesome - it's a great time to be alive. (I think this several times a day, look at how awesome our lives are (well those of us reading this, obviously not yet everybody on earth))
Well, the more you know, the more you know that you don't know.
Predicting what we'll have in the future is always going to be hard, because it's very hard to know the pitfalls, the actual hard problems of a technology. Sending stuff to Mars isn't hard, but having a human survive the trip is really hard because of radiation and psychology, and it took a while to figure that out.
Meanwhile, noone in the 80's thought we'd have the internet, tablets, or mobile phones.
My point is that in the '80s there was a lot of optimism about humankind's capabilities, people were saying "it's not a question of what CAN we do anymore, it is what SHOULD we do", implying we COULD do anything. I believed that at the time, but have grown increasingly skeptical (and I blame the brain drain away from science and into zero-sum games like finance for not fulfilling our potential).
Also, you are wrong about AIDS - apparently in USA alone there are around 18,000 AIDS caused fatalities each year (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/us.htm).
You are wrong about AI too, it has already been implemented - in meat, of all things!