[metal_am]

This is a very surface level analysis like saying that the automobile was just an iterative improvement over a horse. Or a computer is just a better abacus. Fundamental research is all about diving into the weeds and finding new problems to solve. It's true that some of the "low hanging fruit" no longer exists (you won't see someone like Euler or Newton who's names pop up all over the place), but I can promise you that real gains are being made on a lower level. These small gains in fundamental research snowball into bigger advancements. As an example, the transformer architecture used by LLMs was first published in 2017.

[ActorNightly]

Automobile was improvement over the horse because things needed to get places. To improve on current automobile will require either massive government investment and regulation in the sense of flying cars, or full electrification with paradigm shifts in transportation, like induction charging roads or battery hot swaps or whatever else. The modern Corolla Hybrid is pretry much the peak optimal point of transportation.

What do humans need right now to improve their lives substantially?

[exe34]

high temperature superconducting would cause a big leap. cheap energy would also help. cheap compute-in-the-walls. machines doing all the dangerous jobs.