I don't want to downplay progress. Life is very different for many marginalized groups. It's very different for the kid who died of polio in 1918 but would have grown up to be a revolutionary scientist if born in this century. We could go on and on.

Still, we haven't uploaded ourselves into the matrix, we aren't out there colonizing the universe, we haven't unlocked immortality or eternal youth or other dimensions or artificial general intelligences. None of those radical possibilities that people like to dream about seem all that much closer to me than a century ago.

A century ago it was not possible to make a machine that could as much as fake even limited intelligence. A machine that generated plausible human text or image, a machine that played checkers, etc. Our understanding of the mechanisms underlying biological life is incomparably greater, we've sent probes to just about every planet in the solar system, etc. 'No closer than a century ago' is a bewildering claim.

Not "no closer". Just, those goals are so far away that even a century of real, significant progress is small in comparison.

I'm aware that impressive things have happened, but they're not remotely the same. We have a long way to go.

Well, if the republicans get their way, we won't have birth control pills and being a woman will be much different (read: worse).