Dear Dan,
ima take your interesting Q in a different direction, if you would not mind?
...because I think technology is becoming a curve of diminishing returns. Owning all the latest gadgets is not only expensive, but requires huge amounts of time and energy just to maintain them, keep them working.
So I think, anyway i HOPE, that we will spend more efforts getting to understand ourselves; we have developed the technology to destroy the world, now we need to understand the creature whose finger is on that trigger!
* * *
Carl Jung for example put it this way:
"Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being."