The reason I see us continuing to progress is: we have tons of spare intellectual resources. I can't imagine a world where millions of people live in rich countries, who can code, who can read scientific publications, that just stops progressing. Of course the system we've built is constantly evolving, so some things will certainly collapse. E.g. the web will be more and more partitioned - not everything just gets better and better.
But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.
Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of circumstances that are conducive to progress.
Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan.
Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.
>Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard.
I think of it differently: it already did. The old world is already dead. It will just take a couple of generations until that realization kicks in, or until the consequences of that realization are implemented in our cultures and systems. The political incentives in western democracies are not aligned with the interests of the following generations. The opposite is the case, current politicians simply sell the future of their constituents. I'm well aware that lots of things will have to collapse. But I'm coming to a different conclusion than you: I think exactly that's what is conductive for progress.
Unconductive to progress is friction, and social friction is essentially the product of people who hold on to concepts of the world that have already lost their meaning. Very, very few people born before 1990 are worth listening to outside of their exact levels of expertise. But at the same time, almost anyone in power was a) born before 1990 and b) represents the interests of almost exclusively people born before 1990. The number is arbitrary, I just try to illustrate the point.
I just want to say it's incredibly refreshing to read comments from someone looking at the big picture and providing thoughtful optimism about where things are headed.
The geopolitical situation in the 1800s and even the first half of the 1900s was much more volatile than today. Yet, industrialization caused massive changes. In fact that was a big part of the feedbackloop for the political instability. Neverless it certainly wasn't an impediment to innovation and sometime even spurred it (via war funding). I just don't buy that peace and social stability enables progress, I'd argue the very opposite.
But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.