Comment by arcticfox

I think the primary reason why our reality has quickly surpassed a bulk of earlier sci-fi is that sci-fi starts to become less interesting on average as AIs/robots start to dominate the frontier of everything.

It's "progress" but it's...not interesting except at the beginning of the threshold, when AIs overtake humanity. In many sci-fi stories that's a dominant theme, but it's not likely to be a long epoch in reality IMO, based on the very brief periods when machines/AIs have overtaken humans in individual domains (arithmetic, chess, Go, coding, translation, CGI, etc).