You're sitting there, scrolling, maybe waiting for a bus or avoiding a spreadsheet, and that nagging question pops up again: did it happen yet? We live in an era of perpetual "almost." We’ve been told for a decade that the world is about to fundamentally shift, yet here we are, still plugging in chargers and driving our own cars like it’s 2010.
It's frustrating.
There’s this massive gap between the press releases we read in 2019 and the reality of 2026. Tech moves fast, sure, but the "big" things—the world-changers—always seem to be stuck in a beta phase that never ends. Honestly, it’s enough to make anyone cynical. We’re going to look at the scoreboard and see what’s actually landed, what’s still a pipe dream, and why the hype cycle keeps lying to us.
The Self-Driving Car: Still One Hand on the Wheel?
Remember when Elon Musk said we’d have a million robotaxis by 2020? Yeah. That didn't happen. If you’re asking did it happen yet regarding full, Level 5 autonomy, the answer is a resounding no—but with a massive asterisk.
If you live in Phoenix, San Francisco, or parts of Los Angeles, you can actually hail a Waymo. It’s eerie. You get in, there’s nobody in the front seat, and the steering wheel spins like a ghost is driving. It’s a real, commercial product. But for the rest of the world? We’re still stuck in Level 2 or Level 3 territory. Mercedes-Benz actually beat Tesla to the punch here by getting the first U.S. certification for Level 3 automated driving with its "DRIVE PILOT" system, which lets you take your eyes off the road in very specific traffic conditions on certain highways.
But Level 5? The kind where you can sleep in the back while the car navigates a blizzard in rural Montana? That’s decades away. The "edge cases"—the weird stuff like a construction worker holding a stop sign or a plastic bag blowing across the road—are still breaking the brains of the best AI models.
Artificial General Intelligence and the Singularity
People are obsessed with the idea of AGI. They want to know if the machines have finally become smarter than us across every single metric. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis talk about it constantly.
But has it happened?
No. We have LLMs (Large Language Models) that are incredibly good at mimicking human reasoning, but they still hallucinate. They don't have a "world model." They don't actually understand that if you drop a glass, it breaks, unless they've read a million sentences describing that event. We’ve reached a point where AI can pass the Bar Exam or write decent poetry, but it can’t autonomously manage a household or invent a new branch of physics without human prompting. We’re in the era of "Agentic AI," where tools can perform tasks, but the spark of true, independent consciousness—the "did it happen yet" moment for the Singularity—is still speculative.
Nuclear Fusion: The "30 Years Away" Joke
Fusion is the holy grail. Clean, limitless energy. For fifty years, the joke has been that fusion is 30 years away and always will be.
However, something actually changed recently.
In December 2022, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved "ignition." For the first time, they got more energy out of a fusion reaction than the laser energy they put into it. It was a massive deal. Scientific American and Nature covered it extensively because it proved the physics works.
But before you go cancel your power bill, realize that the "gain" was tiny. It didn't account for the massive amount of electricity needed to power the lasers in the first place. We are still waiting for a commercial reactor that can put juice back into the grid. Startups like Helion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems are promising results by the late 2020s, but history suggests we should keep our expectations in check.
The Paperless Office and the Digital Nomad Dream
We’ve been talking about the paperless office since the 70s. Honestly, I still see people printing out emails just to mark them up with a red pen. But the shift toward a truly decentralized, digital-first existence actually did happen—it just took a global pandemic to force the issue.
The infrastructure for the "nomad" life is finally mature. Starlink has made it so you can actually work from a van in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Zoom and Slack, for all their faults, have replaced the physical boardroom for millions. If you’re asking did it happen yet regarding the death of the 9-to-5 office grind, the answer is "partially." It's a hybrid world now. The total collapse of commercial real estate hasn't fully arrived, but the "power move" of forcing everyone back to a cubicle is failing in many sectors.
CRISPR and the End of Genetic Disease
This is one of the few areas where the answer to did it happen yet is a stunning "Yes."
In late 2023 and early 2024, regulators in the UK and the US (the FDA) approved Casgevy. It’s a CRISPR-based gene-editing therapy for sickle cell disease. This isn't just a treatment; it's a functional cure. They take your cells out, edit the "typo" in your DNA, and put them back in. It works.
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This is the beginning of a tidal wave. We are moving from a world where we treat symptoms to a world where we rewrite the underlying code of life. It’s expensive—millions of dollars per patient—but the proof of concept is done. The door is open.
Solid-State Batteries: The EV Holy Grail
Everyone wants an EV that charges in five minutes and goes 600 miles. To get there, we need solid-state batteries. They’re safer, denser, and faster than the lithium-ion batteries in your phone right now.
Toyota has been making big claims about bringing these to market by 2027 or 2028. QuantumScape, a company backed by Volkswagen, has been shipping prototypes to carmakers for testing. But if you want to buy a car with one today? You can't. We are still in the "validation" phase. The chemistry is hard. Scaling it up to millions of units without defects is even harder.
Why We Always Feel Like We’re Waiting
The reason we keep asking did it happen yet is because of the way tech is marketed.
- The Hype Cycle: Companies need VC funding, so they overpromise on timelines.
- The "Last Mile" Problem: It’s easy to get a technology to work 90% of the time. Getting it to work 99.9999% of the time (the level needed for safety or scale) takes ten times longer than the initial invention.
- Regulation: Laws move slower than code. We have the tech for many things that are currently illegal or stuck in "permitting hell."
Real-World Action Steps
Stop waiting for the "big bang" moment where everything changes overnight. That's not how it works. Instead, look for the incremental shifts that signal a trend has finally matured.
- Check the hardware, not the software. If you see a new type of physical infrastructure (like EV charging stations or satellite dishes) appearing in rural areas, the tech has arrived.
- Follow the "Boring" wins. CRISPR curing a rare blood disease is more important than a billionaire's tweet about Mars.
- Audit your own life. Are you still using tech from five years ago because it "works," or are you ignoring tools that could actually save you ten hours a week?
- Look for regulatory filings. When the FDA or the FAA approves something, it’s no longer a lab experiment. It’s a product.
The future didn't arrive in a flying car. It arrived in a sequence of code that fixed a broken gene and a satellite network that blanketed the earth in data. It’s happening right now; it’s just not distributed evenly. Keep your eyes on the small, validated wins—that's where the real revolution is hiding.