>>103823771Sad thing is, back in the Golden Age they handled this without even realizing it just by leaning on knee-jerk sci-fi tropes. Any new technology that would change the world was blown up at the end of the story, the creation of a mad superscientist who'd never share, or jury-rigged out of bizarre/expensive/alien shit by a superscientist hero and would presumably never reach the public sphere (testing, safety, costing, materials, etc) within the scope of the story.
It's really easy to answer "why hasn't Reed Richards changed the world", because you might as well ask why [random NASA scientist] hasn't changed the world. He's got his name on some great physics papers and astroengineering patents, but the average citizen doesn't see anything from those, and his high-end superhero shit is one-off jury-rigging or untested alien tech that'll never make it to mass-market except in a) stories where a villain steals it and makes something bad that is subsequently blown up, b) a nebulous future period reachable only through time travel or narrative flash forwards.
Bad writers don't understand this (or how the scientific community works, for that matter), so we get bizarre stories where Reed Richards is "holding back" supercomputer technology due to bribes from Sony, or where he refuses to share the science behind teleportation because "humanity is not ready", any of which make him look like an arrogant, selfish, short-sighted, mercenary asshole.
This isn't a specific problem with technology - it's symptom of a greater problem, of writers who don't understand how to keep the sandbox clean for others to play in. "Why doesn't Reed Richards change the world" is fundamentally the same question as "Why doesn't Batman kill the Joker", with the same answer:
"Because a series of writers lacked the self-control to avoid creating a world where he logically could/should".
