> "It's awesome."

Well... It's got that potential, that's for sure. It could pretty easily be pushed straight past that line into "awesome" if not for those absolute clowns "at the top" holding it all back decades behind where it should be, all to play their little game of "He who dies with the most money wins" at the eventual expense of all life on Earth (at the rate they're going). It's just so sad the petty misuse and waste of resources the ultra-richest of the rich are choosing to be. Actively working against the betterment of themselves and the world around them, for the most insane reasons, when they could be using all this amazing tech to build a genuinely better world for themselves and everyone else.

Honestly, I look at where technology's gone since my early days (300baud acoustic phone modems, 64kilobytes of RAM, 1Mhz 8bit CPU days) being utterly fascinated by how actual science was so quickly catching up with science fiction (Star Trek being one of my bigger influences in that area of interest), and I see so many truly amazing things that we've invented / built along the way; if we were a more cooperative society instead of "Law of the Jungle" hostile greed-driven society, we'd already pretty much have that Star Trek reality today (minus the faster than light travel bit, as that's apparently "impossible" according to current theory and math AFAIK).

We've already got a bunch of Star Trek level tech, and we could have most of it I suspect. 3D printing? Not terribly far off from ST: TNG "replicators". LLMs? Not too far off from the Star Trek computer interface. Smart Phone? Pretty much a Star Trek PADD (tablet computer). Tricorder? Well... Smart Phones are gettin' pretty close. A few more fancy sensors would pretty much do it. Holodeck? Well, that one's a bit more tricky, but who knows where VR would be today in a society that wasn't totally 100% beholden to the cult of money?