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Actually this discussion has been around longer than I have. In my lifetime, we have gone from B&W TV and the first jet planes to HDTV and space flight. Yet, I heard my parents and grandfather talk about the dramatic changes from horse and buggy (Gramps was a blacksmith) and outhouses to cars and flush toilets.
As Dragonlich said, the speed of change has not been linear but exponential. If you want some older reading material on the subject, check out "Future Shock".
My thoughts on where this will lead have to do with how we generate new technologies. We don't expect one individual to know everything needed to develop new concepts. We have compartmentalized this process of creation. Someone comes up with the overall concept, someone(s) else applies their knowledge to make it work. The rest of us don't care how it works, but what we get out of it. When you have millions of groups doing this, the rate of new technology is mind-boggling for the individual, but workable for the individual groups doing the development because they aren't looking beyond their own projects.
The other concept is that of the damage done to the earth. No question that there has been some. But at the same time, we are applying new technologies to fix it. At one time many rivers flowed with undrinkable, down-right dangereous water. Those same rivers today have been restored. Old mining techniques left huge scars in the earth through strip mining. Many of those areas today are being rebuilt with technologies that have been recently developed. My point is that as we realized the problems we have caused someone developed ways to mitigate those problems.
Obviously, I am pretty optomistic that we will continue to see that rapid growth of new technologies; and that we will learn to fix the problems that we didn't anticipate; and that we will learn to better anticipate the problems that our changes will cause and fix them before they are problems.
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If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
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