~~I don't think we are, no. The thing is, science journalism is rife with hype and exaggeration. Everything is hyped up as being some amazing "breakthrough", when really it's just some tiny incremental advance. This is especially the case with medical and bioscience, where every week it seems like we hear about some wonderful new cancer treatment or something about stem cells or CRISPR-Cas9 that's about to set the world on fire.
The truth is, biology is extremely complicated and every little advance is hard won. There's so many unknowns, so many hard problems, that we're only making incremental progress. It's not accelerating at a faster and faster rate; we're just baby-stepping along. There's still so much we don't understand about the brain, or about our genes. And we keep finding out that things are never as simple and straightforward as we had hoped.
And medicine must also go through rigorous testing, so even when we do discover some new drug or treatment, we have to test it out to make sure it's safe and effective. This takes many years, well over a decade at least. If you hear about something that's just been discovered in the lab, don't expect to see it actually reach patients before at least 10 years, at least. And that's if everything goes smoothly and it makes it through clinical trials. But usually you'll hear about some awesome new breakthrough...and then never hear about it again.
The thing is, it's actually kind of harmful to constantly hype up medical breakthroughs like this. People who have cancer or other diseases read about these "breakthroughs" and get their hopes up, when in reality no treatment or cure is forthcoming. At least, the odds are against it. And the people who make these big grand promises about cancer cures and regenerative medicine, they don't take any responsibility for when these promises fail. And vulnerable people keep getting their hopes up for nothing.
We need to be more honest about the pace of research and medical progress. It's not that we're making zero progress, but that the progress is much slower than we would like. In many cases, significantly slower. And futurists and science journalists shouldn't be hyping up miracle cures when there's no indication of anything like that on the horizon.~~