With the already discovered properties of nature, humanity can do a lot. But most of what we can do requires mass cooperation. Consider refrigerators:
The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that, until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration? --Ted Kaczynski
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
What if in the future some properties of nature are discovered that would enable people to construct refrigerators using only materials grown or mined in their backyard, without any dependencies on other technology? And what if it were also made possible to construct telecommunication devices in this way? It seems unthinkable now, but lots of things that are possible today seemed unthinkable in the past.
I think it would be noble for society to aim towards discovering knowledge that would enable people to construct technologies like these. This kind of knowledge would empower people, and make them less dependent on "the system". But instead society just wants to construct technologies such as AI, that would empower "the system" and make people irrelevant.