The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle and a 1% gain once a decade is hailed as miraculous.
What about post-tensioned concrete slabs? Cross-laminated timber? Structural glazing? Intumescent paint?
Technology does keep improving, actually.
I can also create a web scale app in a weekend using AWS. It is just insane what we can do now vs. 1999. I remember in early 2000s Microsoft boasting how it could host a site for the olympics using active server pages. This was PR worthy. That would be a side project for most of us now using our pocket money.
Same for video calls. Screen sharing can be useful at times, but it would be easy distribute materials to all participants and collaborate on a conference call. You'll have better audio latency that way. So it's not super obvious to me that the latest Wunderwaffe are actually significantly better, but it is clear they use a hell of a lot more compute cycles and bandwidth.
There are many reasons for all those things not to change. Limits abound. We discovered that getting taller or faster isn’t “better”, all we needed is smarter. Intelligence is different. It applies to everything else. You can lose a limb or eyesight and still be incredibly capable. The intelligence is what makes us able to handle all the other limits and change the world even though MS Word hasn’t changed much.
We are now applying a lot of our intelligence to inventing another one. The architecture won’t stay the same, the limits won’t endure. People keep trying and it’s infinitely harder to imagine reasons why progress will stop. Just choose any limit and defend it.
