This is going to come off as tangential at first, but I am beginning to think that the next great human progress will not be engineering, or science, but philosophy.<p>We discovered nuclear fission in the 40s. We can fix atmospheric nitrogen into industrial fertilizer. We communicate at the speed of light. We can manufacture things so absurdly complicated and with such small tolerances that we can do everything from microelectronics to spaceflight. We can and do literally farm in deserts and we do alchemy as a power source!<p>So how is it that our primary means of collaboration dates to antiquity and potentially into prehistory? Here I specifically mean the mechanism of prices and currency exchange.<p>We refined it somewhat at various points - we layered powerful abstractions onto it with the invention of the corporation and securitized ownership thereof; we gave it a macro structure with capitalism and free markets, to socialize the concepts we wanted people to engage with. But at the end of the day, the system works because it is the most accepting of reality - it is a system that reinforces itself when people are driven to try to exploit it, instead of falling apart. Indeed, it reinforces almost too well - most of our intervention into it takes the form of "nudging" local minima - breaking up monopolies, enforcing minimum qualities, etc.<p>So, we have this system that has been fundamentally the same. And to my perception, we have two ways out: we either Star Trek our way to complete abundance, to where the cost of everything is ~0 so everyone might as well be given enough. Or - we decide that even though it is not free, it is time that everyone has enough. And given we've managed to literally perform alchemy and actual biblical miracles of agriculture, and we're still not really much closer, I hesitate to say that anything but the conversion of energy to highly-structured matter - a la Star Trek replicators - will make notable progress here.<p>So I think that the next big step forward will be philosophical. We need to take this urge that the article mentions - where people see the 90 year old working in the street, say "this is wrong", and correct it - and we need to make it so that people believe and live it axiomatically. We need to say - even though I cannot see them, and they may not look like me or think like me, they should have enough.