cube wrote:The Questionable:
1) materials engineering - composites (nice but nothing huge)
Huge. Really huge. Nanotechnology (way overhyped, but in real world applications already, and with strong success), ceramics, fibres, biomaterials, you name it. Huge advances, still huge potential. Ever saw a windmill from the 50s? Saw those laughably tiny blades?
2) jet propulsion/space travel - ?
Who would care about space travel? By the way, fuel efficiency more than doubled from 1970 till today (way after jet trubines becam standard), simply amazing, yet people simply do not notice.
3) power generation / power grid - (falling apart)
What on earth are you talking about? North Korea? Zimbabve? Anyway, this has almost nothing to do with technological progress per se.
4) cars - hybrids (not exactly new)
Drive around in a 70s car, drive around in a 2007 car, then tell with a straight face there were no significant improvements. Obviously, fuel efficiency was not greatly improved, mainly because the customer did not demand so forcefully.. And, a hybrid for an almost competetive price, that's totally new and nothing to scoff at.
6) water treatment - (shortages)
Zulu? Egypt? What are you talking about? Water management became way better in many countries, due to better consciousness about it, better infrastructure, and computer usage for monitoring. On the same time, water resources got under heavy stress in many parts of the world, since we all wanted more and more and more of water--consuming services, but this has almost nothing to do with technological progress per se.
7) structural engineering - (taller skyscrapers and longer bridges but nothing amazing)
What on earth do you expect? A Transfomer[tm] skyscraper which doubles as a spacecraft for our daily afternoon trip to Betelgeuze? Buildings are built way faster, way more energy efficient in saner countries and (for the middle class) way more individual than anybody in 1970 could experience. And if you don't find the shanghai skyline amazing, I can't help it.
8 ) railroads - HSR (nice but not overwhelmingly impressive)
300 km/h on the railroad, top velocities of >400km/h on maglev,
what shall those guys do to impress you? Let the train be pulled by flying pigeons?
11) medicine - (still looking for the cure for cancer and the common cold)
They DID find cures for cancer. Lots of them. No wonder-all-gone cure, but still amazing achievements. The success in childhood non--leukemia cancers is particularly astounding: Longer--term (naturally, no till-end-of-life estimates can be given now) mortality rates dropped from over 80 to under 20 percent.
Read it and weep folks. If you can get past the media hype about the supposed "information age" and instead look at what keeps civilization afloat aka "infrastructure" you'll notice it's being severely stressed.
Whatever this means. My impression is rather that people are spoiled from the technological revolution which came with computers, and now expect a revolution of some sort every year, while evolution, i.e., gradual improvement, is the natural course of technology 99% of the time.