Technology

You're typing on a device that stores trillions of pieces of data and makes billions of computations per second with the ability to grab data on almost anything from around the world in milliseconds, using electricity transmitted from hundreds of kilometers through wires on towers dozens of meters tall connected to megastructures that do things like burn coal as fast as entire trains can pull into the yard, or spin in the wind with blades the size of jumbo jets, or the like, which were delivered to their location by vehicles with computer-timed engines burning a fuel that was pumped up halfway around the world from up to half a dozen kilometers underground and locked into complex strata (through wells drilled by diamond-lined bores that can be remote-control steered as they go), shipped around the world in tankers with volumes the size of large city blocks and the height of apartment complexes, run through complex chemical processes in unimaginable quantities, distributed nationwide and sold to you at a corner store for $1.80 a gallon, which you then pay for with a little piece of microchipped plastic, if not a smartphone, which does all of the aforementioned computer stuff but in a box the size of your hand that tolerates getting beaten up in your pocket all day.

But technology never seems to advance...