I don’t agree that there is a technological stagnation. Tech moves in fits and starts, and to the extent that it is true that most of the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, keep in mind that the definition of “low-hanging fruit” changes over time.
But where there is stagnation it’s because we’ve given up nearly completely on basic research, forsaken undertaking large, outlandish projects, and also that the best minds have been driven to finance, law and other well-remunerated but generally-harmful pursuits rather than doing anything useful.
That one factor I think explains a whole lot — if you’re a lawyer busy destroying an innovative company or idea with a patent lawsuit, you’re a huge long-term harm to society. Same with bankers and nearly everything they do.
Stagnation in some areas isn’t occurring because there’s nothing left to discover, to achieve, to imagine but rather that the entire idea of human progress now has got its head pushed underwater and is drowning under the weight of a system that does not value it.
But where there is stagnation it’s because we’ve given up nearly completely on basic research, forsaken undertaking large, outlandish projects, and also that the best minds have been driven to finance, law and other well-remunerated but generally-harmful pursuits rather than doing anything useful.
I know of at least one person who went into finance instead of physics precisely for those reasons. He could not afford grad school and felt obligated to support his mother and his sister.
It also seems to me that much of the technological advances focus on getting rid of human labor. This has two effects: driving low wage jobs and the “unskilled” out of the workplace and exacerbating a situation where the highly skilled professions adopt a guild structure, credentialism and other informal or invisible barriers to preserve income and status. If there are no great numbers of people in a profession it is hardly is worth the effort to automate it further.
Humanity has never really used even half of its minds or a quarter of its intellectual potential. I suspect we’ll discover we are either at peak or we passed that peak a while ago.
“Exacerbating a situation where the highly skilled professions adopt a guild structure, credentialism and other informal or invisible barriers to preserve income and status.”
That’s a good observation. Then of course even in such cognitive professions especially in such an alignment too much becomes about signaling and rituals rather than discovery, since real innovation is actually dangerous to one’s professional livelihood — but paradoxically mostly due to how the occupation is organized. For the larger system, self-defeating. For the individual who has “made it,” beneficial.
About being at intellectual peak, probably. Evolution is still working. Brains are expensive. Facts on the ground change, what the blind and amoral process of evolution selects for changes.