I want to believe that the work started by Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, Alan Kay, etc still has a long way to go.
On the other hand,
1. It feels like they addressed most of the low-hanging fruit
2. A lot of what was done by these people was build user interfaces. Does that qualify as thinking tools? Sure, the tools give us the ability to e.g., build crazy-looking buildings, but is that all there is?
The idea of inventing Arabic numerals in a world that uses Roman numerals is very powerful and transformative. But the bicycle-for-the-mind metaphor which we like to talk about in relation to graphical user interfaces is more augmentative (I can go further) than transformative (I can instantly teleport to another dimension).
3. Is it also possible we don't recognise modern advances because they're more gradual and diffuse? There are no PARCs and Bell Labs anymore because there are many PARCs and Bell Labs. Recent examples: how computing is helping with drug discovery, protein folding—these should count for something.
Having said all that, I have one big hope (dream?) for computing in the political space that involves complete transparency for democracies and a lot more citizen involvement. I imagine something like that evolving over a long period of time, as people adapt and begin to think differently. In my head, computing provides the vision of how things could be, but doesn’t necessarily lead the way with implementation.
