Thiel has some good points about the lack of progress. Rocketry is only slightly better than it was 45 years ago. We've hit the limit of chemical fuels, and weight reduction can only go so far. In comparison, 45 years took us from the Wright Flyer to the first jet aircraft.
Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of things, there hasn't been all that much progress. Most of the action is at the low-power end.
Biology is nowhere near hitting a wall. Commercially, though, bio isn't generating huge new businesses. Nanotechnology has devolved from micromachines to surface treatments for materials such as Rust-Oleum NeverWet.
The robot revolution may happen, but robot manipulation in unstructured situations still sucks. Watch these two videos:
Fusion power is quite a bit further along than 45 years ago. We're in the process of building ITER, with ignition expected in 2020. The main problem for fusion power is the utter lack of funding it receives:
Uh huh. Exactly what will they have accomplished by 2020? Ignition? Who cares? Based on their own timeline the earliest possible date for a commercial fusion reactor is 2050.
Do you have a more credible source than a website from someone who claims to have received letters from aliens? There seems to enough scientific consensus that ITER will work to convince people to spend quite a bit of money on it.
The definition of "will work" has been downsized over the years.
What ITER is now claimed to do is much less than it was originally supposed to do. Originally it was supposed to be able to produce 500MW more or less continuously. That goal has been downsized to 300-500 seconds. The current record for holding a fusion reaction together is about a second. If ITAR beats that by a reasonable margin, its backers can call it a victory and go home.
45 years ago the internet was in it's infancy, only available to people at selected institutions. Why not count the internet as a great piece of progress?
Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of things, there hasn't been all that much progress. Most of the action is at the low-power end.
Biology is nowhere near hitting a wall. Commercially, though, bio isn't generating huge new businesses. Nanotechnology has devolved from micromachines to surface treatments for materials such as Rust-Oleum NeverWet.
The robot revolution may happen, but robot manipulation in unstructured situations still sucks. Watch these two videos:
Robot assembling water pump using visual guidance and force feedback, 1974: https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump
Robot picking up flashlight and putting key in lock using visual guicance and force feedback, 2014: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPD5tUlKGMM
Not much difference there.