As I look at the world on Thanksgiving in 2015, I'm thankful for an awful lot of things.

Humanity has never been better off than it is right this very second. Nearly everything that has caused our species misery in the past is lessened considerably today - fewer people die of disease, hunger, war, childbirth, unclean water than ever before. There are certainly war-torn parts of the world but the numbers of humans affected grows smaller every year. There is also still around a billion humans living in abject poverty, but the percentage of us who live like that has been falling steadily over the last few decades.

Dogmatic religion is losing its grip around the entire world. As people are lifted into the developing and developed world, they increasingly either lose their religion or their religious views become much more liberal. Even in the darkest, most backward religious backwaters like Saudi Arabia, progress is very slowly being made. Even expressing the possibilities of allowing women to vote (or drive) a few years ago would have been met with violence; both are now being openly discussed. As dogma fades, humanity advances. Certainly we have a very long way to go, but we're undeniably slowly waking up.

In first world countries around the planet, sexual diversity and identification is being celebrated. Homosexual marriages are becoming legal in more and more places. More than that, though, the accelerating acceptance of the transgendered community, even in the United States, is an indication that the concept of gender itself is softening. Many of us transhumanists believe that as we transition to a less biological state, gender will become either irrelevant or much more fluid. We're seeing the leading edge of that right now around the world.

In November 2015, we're teetering right on the edge of The Age of Questionable Reality. Virtual reality is virtually here. Millions of humans will be spending millions of hours within virtual environments by the end of 2016. Augmented Reality will further push the limits of what we accept as real in the coming years as well. The advancement of VR and AR technologies certainly seem to be accelerating at least as quickly now as general computing. It's not difficult at all to image children accepting virtual reality as being just as real as "real" reality in 10 or 15 years. AR/VR should help to further bring the entire human family together as it helps diminish our differences.

Automation is freeing ever more humans from drudgery. We are very close to removing humans from transportation thanks to the dawn of self-driving autos, and in coming years we can celebrate the end of forced human unskilled labor of all sorts from construction jobs to retail to sanitation and fast food jobs. This freeing of humanity from drudgery will awaken many more millions of humans and allow an awful lot of us to utilize our brains on making everyone else's lives better. There are undeniable challenges, true, but even our nearly blind governments will be forced to face this reality very soon.

This morning I read about a $5 computer that's many times more powerful than the $3000 PCs that I sold back in the early 90s. My house is full of devices that are all interconnected to each other and the cloud. We're connecting more and more inexpensive computers at the same time that they're getting even less expensive and much smaller. This dizzying acceleration of cheapness, tininess and ubiquity should continue for the foreseeable future. It points the way towards the nanotechnological future Drs Feynman and Drexler sparked in our imaginations.

Let us also be thankful that one of our biggest problems, that of over reliance on fossil fuels for energy, is also at the cusp of being solved. Several disruptive technologies, from the acceleration of improving solar cells to the drastic changes hurtling towards us with electric vehicles, to the more likely than ever fusion reactor, are coming together quicker than most people can see. Our species may finally be on the track with the possibility of catching up to our run-away environmental damage. We're in the race at least, finally.

The state of humanity is still unacceptable. We're better off, but nowhere near where we should be as a species. There's still too much division. There's too much hatred. There's too much violence and hunger and suffering. However, there are many rays of technological, societal and cultural progress converging and shining as a beacon of hope. Now, more than ever before, it looks like we might just pull through this together and make it through humanity's adolescence and finally begin to grow up. There's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's steadily getting brighter.