The USA is the epitome of success in the material world. They have conquered the art of making great things. Right from roads to rockets, they have done it all with style.
But we live on three planes – material, intellectual and spiritual.
If the point of technology is to free our time for more creative pursuits, we cannot think that betting on Wall Street or making a new cereal or making another Instagram dance video is the kind of potential we want to achieve.
Next frontier is the intellectual and spiritual worlds. We are yet to understand anything about how our minds work. We are yet to put together basic thought patterns of human beings. We are yet to understand our own emotions. And on a spiritual plane, we have, it seems stopped at the Greek Philosophers and the ancient philosophies of the East as our last significant work.
We have to develop intellectual frameworks that are as good as the autobahn, we have yet to achieve interpersonal communication with the ease with which many in the animal kingdom operate effortlessly.
This is not to say that we have completely conquered the material world. We still have a lot to learn about our own planet and its systems. But we have conquered the material plane to the certainty that most people will have a basic set of resources to live a decent life with the advent of AI and robotics.