Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

Let me offer a diverging perspective:

>we could be doing so much better as a species

...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and meaningless in the greater scheme.

If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad because in a theoretical instance of our world things could be better, won't close the delta between our is and your ought.

>We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars

this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core problems are derived from an unfair distribution of resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers!

One really major innovation is that we have developed the capacity to do experiments at a massive volume physically, and are just - with the big data revolution - developing the capability to understand these data volumes and translate them into findings.

Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed.

And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet.

What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.

Is the blooming you refer to helping humans and making them healthier and happier though? Or smarter? For the average person in the USA that I encounter it seems like the answer to smarter is a resounding no. And this seems to correspond with the rise of social media in the timeline in my head. Human intelligence doesn’t evolve lower in such a short time period, but the knowledge in that head varies greatly with what you put in it.

> I'd argue that the low-hanging fruit of science has been picked.

I think people always believe that, and people 20 years from now will think the same about today's time. That's because hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that things that seem very simple and obvious might've taken a colossal effort to come up with.

Perhaps the Genius-creation-rate is the same as it always was, but their marketing value has plummeted? Now, with people like the Kardashians, various populist politicians, ... and the general anti-science, anti-expert that seems to wander about the internet, who looks for or listens to them?

Money, fame (err, notoriety), clicks - this is what matters now. Not sage discussion of physics, math or cosmology. Granted, very very very few people have a 1905 moment but people still publish and try to communicate. There are a number of effective, relatively popular science communicators but man, they're just lost in the noise.