In the future people will look back at comments like this and wonder how we could be so blind. But that's because what will be obvious to them is not so obvious to us. We are immersed in our history, we are distracted by flashy short-term trends and comparatively blind to subtle, long-term trends. Partly because we lack the foresight to see which trends will win out in the long run.
However, let's look at how the very nature of the world has changed in the last half century and how that might play out over the next few decades.
Let's look at the developed world. 50 years ago that was pretty much just the US/Canada and Western Europe, with smatterings of incomplete industrialization elsewhere. Today Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea are unarguably developed, first world nations. And the coastal parts of China as well as Chile, Brazil, and several other countries are well on their way to that status and will join it within the next decade or two.
Meanwhile, war is becoming less common, and average quality of life as well as longevity is, overall, increasing everywhere in the entire world. This is an unprecedented event in human history, we are becoming more peaceful, wealthier, and healthier. And not just a small elite portion of the world, all of it (see Hans Rosling's TED talk for more on that).
Let's look at trade. In 1960 trade was remarkably limited. The world population was about 3 billion, gross world product was about 7 trillion USD (compared to 70 trillion today). In between the world grew by about 2x and got about 10x richer. Part of this is due to the invention of containerized shipping, which brought about a revolution in international shipping, increasing shipping tonnage by an order of magnitude or more. Today the total value of goods being transported internationally on the oceans is twice the value of the entire world economy in 1960.
Let's look at communications. Even in, say, 1980 the world was still a relatively disconnected place. Most people on Earth had never made a single phone call, and news of the world was still hard to come by. Today the world is knit together by a world-spanning instantaneous communications network, and the power of communication has been put into the hands of the world's population. It is not unusual nor terribly expensive to carry on a conversation in real-time with a person across the world, not just in the "1st world" but in the "3rd world" as well. News from all parts of the world now comes in the form of first hand reports and cell phone videos as much as it does from reporters repeating accounts from interviewed locals.
And that revolution in communications that has largely taken root only in the last decade has had a transformative effect on the world, and on geopolitics. Look at the revolutions of late, how quickly they spread, how they are still spreading, and how much they have overturned about the way we thought the world worked. The geopolitical landscape of 2015 will be unrecognizable from the perspective of 2005, and much of that is due to communication technology.
Let's look at business. In the US there has been an explosion of entrepreneurship on a massive scale. Many of the largest and most influential companies of today (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) were created not just within the last half century but even within the last 30 or 20 years. And new companies are sprouting up all the time (such as facebook). Meanwhile, a great many people are acquiring the capability to work for themselves on their own projects. The internet has made it that much easier for people to run their own businesses. Musical artists have found out how to be successful without signing on to a major label. Webcomic artists have discovered how to make a living without working through the syndication companies or being employees of large comic book corporations. Craftspeople have discovered how to sell their wares directly to the public through etsy or ebay or their own websites. And so many folks of many varying talents have taken their careers on a sharp detour via crowd-funding systems such as kickstarter. Already hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars are flowing through this new economy of self-made businesses, and it's growing at a fantastic pace. How fundamentally will this change the economy? In the next 20 years will it be more common for people to be their own boss and work as independent contractors than to be employees of a large corporation?
Let's look at medicine. AIDS was discovered in the 1980s. Throughout all of human history the only effective "treatment" for a lethal virus has been a vaccine, and yet scientists managed to develop effective treatments for AIDS within a matter of years. And today AIDS can be treated as a chronic illness. And too our understanding of biology and biochemistry has exploded. We've decoded the genome of not just homo sapiens but many other species and we've only just begun to understand biology on that level. But we've been able to experiment with amazing things, lab-grown organ replacements, genetic therapy, etc. Today someone with insulin dependent diabetes can buy actual, human insulin for a very affordable price. And this is because the gene to produce that insulin has been taken from humans and placed into bacteria which are then grown in vats and the insulin is extracted and purified. This is an amazing, futuristic achievement, and yet it is bog standard ordinary for today's world.
Let's look at technology and manufacturing. Computing power, of course, has exploded, and it will continue to do so as we develop new technologies like memristors and other breakthrough ideas. Manufacturing is in the midst of a sea change, as computer powered CNC machine tools, 3D printing, and much more are paving the way toward vastly accelerated cycles of development (whereby the time-frame between coming up with an idea and seeing that idea borne out in mass-production manufacturing has been shortened to a matter of weeks if not days, in the near future that will be measured in a matter of hours or minutes). And that will pave the way for fully automated manufacturing and fully configurable manufacturing. Imagine if anyone could visit a website, fill in a form, upload a few 3D models, pay a modest sum of money and have a bulk shipment of manufactured goods that were defined by that data (say, laptops, or smartphones, or bicycles, or automobiles) loaded onto a boat in a matter of days. What happens when a company with, say, 5 employees can build iPhones of the same quality and in sufficient volume to challenge Apple? What happens to the undeveloped world when we can make factories that run on solar power and bulk materials and output industrial goods (like tractors, cars, refrigerators, power stations, and water purification equipment), or when factories can produce factories themselves?
The world is a much different place than it was a half century ago, and it is on track to become an astoundingly different place than we can scarcely imagine. And the roots have been planted right here, right now.
P.S. Also, a tremendous amount of social change has happened in the last 50 years, both in the US and in the world. Much of that was enabled or assisted by technological change. It's easy to miss this because when comparing across time we tend to compare like with like, however we should remember that the lives we are comparing to in the 1960s aren't necessarily average lives, they are probably elite lives (e.g. straight christian white males with high-paying jobs).