That's Nice but What About...

Yesterday this article, The End of the Future, magically appeared in my inbox. The author, Peter Thiel, is the founder of PayPal and he questions whether our society has come to the end of it's innovating ability. To me, his metrics are questionable. In the second section, he holds our modern-day accomplishments against projections from the 1950s and 60s and basically outs himself as a member of the generation bitter about the lack of commercially available flying cars and/or jet packs. However, our obvious failings to keep up with things like 70s energy policy are disappointing to say the least.
It's nearly impossible to make projections about innovation because it quite often, it springs from a source or a problem that may not currently exist and certainly didn't exist in 1960. But Thiel's points are valid. We may have innovated ourselves into a corner, skipped over arguably more important things like energy independence in favor of smaller and smaller microprocessors. It seems like what Thiel is trying to say is that now that we've come this far, with cellphones in the hands of millions of people, with Moore's Law outperforming Moore's expectations - can we work on what we've missed? Can we use our social networks, our supercomputers and our smart phones to eliminate the gender gap, straighten out the economy and improve our general well-being instead of using technology as a distraction from these larger problems.
Perhaps we need a formalized, national goal - like putting a man on the moon - to get behind. Is there any way we can inspire both pride and consensus in our generation to work toward a positive accomplishment?