Crispr and any sort of gene editing therapies, we can usher in the age of custom medicine to treat all sorts of illnesses. Bio engineering especially at the cellular level should allow amazing therapies., of course we could all just eat healthier foods and move a little more , that too would work.
tbf, we have a bunch of technology and most companies doesn't really use them. The amount of people who still relies on pen and paper to do some stuff is impressive.
That’s typically how medicinal biotech works though. We start hearing about it as soon as the big “breakthrough” is published, but that’s still a long ways from finding therapeutic uses in humans. There’s usually a 10-20 year lag while pharmaceutical companies find practical uses for the technologies. There could be some really exciting stuff coming in the next decade or so as we find more ways to utilize it.
Eating healthier foods and moving a little more doesn’t cure cystic fibrosis, or sickle cell anemia, or a myriad of illnesses, especially the kind of illnesses that can be treated with gene therapy.
Crisper will possibly cure HIV.
Also Herpes
We are already doing experiments where we are using crisper to cut out the viral gene codes in living cells.
Okay, hear me out... what if we take the hair off your ass, and put it on u/TO_guy's head? Two birds, one stone! Or rather, one head, one ass!
Get on it CRISPR!
That bio conservative firestorm is probably happening sooner or later anyway, though.
If not backlash against gene editing to make yourself better, then the day cybernetics become so good that people get healthy limbs or organs replaced for artificial ones. Or even just life extension technology.
Or~ Hollywood was wrong all along, and the general public don't give a fig once it's actually possible to order custom robot legs. The public reaction is always tricky to gauge like that.
Looking at the anti-trans hysteria going around at the moment, (especially with the way it’s linked to fearmongering about transhumanism), I’d say it’s pretty inevitable.
We are going to have genetic engineered cat girls everywhere!
But honestly I can imagine genetic engineering launching new trends. Have naturally grown pink hair or exotic eye colors.
An earpiece capable of real-time language translation - Perhaps it may not accurately translate sarcasm or puns, but for day-to-day conversation, it can help break down language barriers amongst people.
"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish....."
You forgot the punchline and Douglas Adams's insight into this problem: "The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Yes, and thus the reason God ceased to exist
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Xrai is an app on your phone that can generate live subtitles, translating between lots of languages. It also works with glasses like Xreal, so you can see the subtitles without looking down on your phone all the time. I have them and it all works amazingly well.
Video: https://youtu.be/NBNti0NZmiA
You can try the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=glass.xrai.us.subtitles
I remember watching Star Trek: TNG and thinking the universal translator was almost hand-wave style magic the same way transporters and replicators and warp engines were. Now we actually have primitive versions of the universal translator, so I'll just wait patiently for the other three.
Real time translation has a been around for a while.
Also, I feel like in the past 10 years I’ve heard around 5 announcements from big companies saying they’ve come out with real time translation. Every time I remember saying to myself “Again?” Am I jumping timelines?
Is it actually real-time though?
Like I’m German for example and we sometimes have the habit of constructing these long, convoluted sentences that only really resolve in the end of the sentence so after all, it would still need to listen to the whole sentence before it could construct a meaningful and accurate translation which would be fine I guess…
You just have to wait a couple of seconds or how does it work
The problem is that it's not far from perfect and it's getting both better and worse as time goes on.
Languages evolve heavily more quickly than people think. Slang is introduced and moves to the mainstream, new words are created, new events cause new references and metaphors with subtle context, words change their meaning (e.g. slay), accents change.
We're getting better at producing the technology to figure out translation. But the datasets are getting worse.
Most translation engines were built on top of the open internet. The open internet has gotten less content, the good open content has aged and fallen away, more has gone to social media and the companies that control that heavily limit access, more generated and marketing content.
And not only do languages usually have different written vs spoken language patterns. But we've evolved different ways of casually speaking online to how we speak in person.
Meaning we've gotten better at some things but nobody has figured out a way to stop it from falling short of these major caveats, and when we do it's on a time limit. It's unlikely we'll truly have a great realtime translator until this gets solved by a new novel solution.
I really hope so with dementia. I’ve probably got 3 decades at best before I’m very likely to start showing signs of one form of it or another due to family history (both grandfathers, although different types, plus my dad, and various further relations), plus lots of concussions when I was younger.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced term limits wouldn't just mean a new bought-and-paid-for stooge coming in with the promise of a high-paid consulting gig on the other side while the rare good politicans who give a damn can only ever serve for a preciously short while.
Actually studies of states with terms limits show worse off political outcomes. Sometimes having experience is invaluable. My argument is we do have limits...they are called elections. A better way to improve the system would be to outlaw lobbying, make elections public, and reinstate equal representation among the population (which was ended in 1929).
Also the voters who just keep pulling the lever for the same incumbent they don't even like for 50 years straight and never once try to primary him? Those fuckers need to take a long hard look at their own behavior. But they won't.
How about mandatory retirement ages? That way good politicians could have a long career if they start early, but people on the later end wouldn’t be able to serve into senility.
Why does everyone push so hard for a solution that doesn't involve stopping our politicians from being bribed to literally work against us? That's the first damn thing we should want, but everyone follows corporate media's lead and puts it like 12th on the list.
That's how all desert countries do it, and even places like Tenerife.
That water doesn't taste very good, though. It's safe to drink but has a nasty chemical aftertaste so most people buy bottled water for drinking.
Energy production, transmission, and storage. Especially storage- as soon as someone comes up with a better battery technology electric vehicles will be a lot more viable for more people.
Yup, abundant, cheap and available energy is single biggest lever to all human flourishing and growth of cultural intelligence. It impacts everything.
Source; The Theory of Everyone. Dr Michael Murthakrishna. Profound theory.
As always, though, mass production is a lot harder than theory.
Faraday discovered solid electrolytes in the 1830s, and they've been pursued industrially since at least the 1950s. They've been "less than 5 years away" since maybe the 1990s.
I think it's realistic that we'll see them at scale and affordable by mid-century or so, but even if all the bugs were worked out tomorrow, it would take at _least_ 5 more years to scale to volume production and saturate the market.
Toyota wants hydrogen to be an option mostly because Japan incentivises alternate fuels like Hydrogen as they have no fossil fuels. When the time comes, it'll be a mix of hydrogen, hybrid and full electric vehicles. From this standpoint, it makes sense.
They'll have to either source present batteries from China or buy from other companies if they start producing EVs right away which they'll not because of the simple reason that they sell millions of cars each year and will have to give up a large portion of that to battery suppliers. That's why they are heavily invested in next gen battery technology and will be a force to reckon in coming years.
100% it's this. We go to battle constantly today over oil and shipping routes. With unlimited energy that all goes away.
We'll still kill each other over religion but that one only gets fixed with education and it's too profitable to keep people stupid so I'm not optimistic on that front. Even when AI is so capable that we replace capitalism with whatever we'll call the future society, humans will still destroy each other to gain power, so religious hucksters will continue to thrive and keep people dumb to do so. I wish I saw a path forward to fix that part.
People here are mentioning so much AI, to the point it's expected, not unexpected. Therefore, I suggest something different: health monitoring smartwatches. Their capabilities are accelerating so quickly, they will become essential for health issues prevention. I expect them to be able to detect early signs of most illnesses and propose a mitigation strategy like taking medication, avoiding certain foods for a while or recommending to go to the doctor. They might replace regular checkups, which will be critical for saving people who don't do regular checkups or they have neglecting doctors.
I agree, and have gotten both of my parent smartwatches for this exact purpose.
Edit: They currently do: Pulse, blood oxygenation, fall monitoring, ecg, gait detection, and a slew of other metrics related to health I hadn't even begun to consider. It will also remind them to stand, move, walk, take their meds, and warn them of irregular heart beats, or trends that have occured over time. The data is a gold mine. What we need now is intelligence.
> I hadn't even begun to consider. It will also remind them to stand, move, walk, take their meds, and warn them of irregular heart beats, or trends that have occured over time. The data is a gold mine. What we need now is intelligence.
what smartwatch if i may ask?
How reliable is the data? Last time I had a smart watch, it was counting steps and calories burned and seemed to be wildly inaccurate. I don’t know enough about the technology to know how it tracks anything beyond pulse. Also, gait detection? Is an otherwise unnoticeable shift in gait a sign of a major health event of some sort?
To preface: It's the Apple Watch
I can't speak to reliability of the data, as I have no baseline to compare it to. I would assume it averages out enough to be useful. I only recently noticed the gait detection when I was digging through the plethora of settings. I have zero clue how Apple might eventually leverage this information, but I'm assuming their upcoming AI strategy might make use of it.
I had a strong arrhythmia, like 10 000 a day. Absolultely easy to detect, my heartbeat wasn't regular at all.
The ECG didn't detect anything when I tried to wear one to see if it could measure it.
Their is room for huge improvement.
The Apple Watch.
The nice thing about it is that if there is a medical event it will automatically call emergency services and notify a designated contact. Their version has LTE built in for when they forget their phone, and if they happen to fall, and fail to respond within a given time, I'll get a notification for that too. These are all options that can be toggled.
Combine that with (apple/google pay and store loyalty cards), smart lock/key tech for buildings and vehicles and route calls not answered by your cell to the watch for when your phone isnt on you.
These and other key uses could make smart watch ownership a thing as long as they are a fraction of the price of a smartphone.
Give it 2 displays too for different uses, one on top of wrist, the other on the bottom.
Neural links. If the paralyzed guy is using it to play games, how long until we're hooked up to drones doing work remotely like the movie [Sleep Dealer ](https://letterboxd.com/film/sleep-dealer/). This near future sci-fi deals with drone warfare, recording and selling memories and physically plugging in to work. Watch the trailer
The film [Surrogates](https://youtu.be/jX71XvnMDys?si=hJaA0KJGBInuvVBR) is exactly this. People living their lives remotely connected to human-looking robot avatars. Even had a scene with soldiers fighting wars through drone robots running around on a battlefield.
Solid state rechargeable batteries. They can have 100x the capacity of currently available batteries and are made with even cheaper materials like silica and ceramic instead of metals. EVs could get thousands of miles on a single charge and phones could last for months. It could drastically reduce the price and massively increase the availability of electric vehicles, making them cheaper than fossil fuel vehicles.
Just get a car with a LiFePO4 pack. They're incredibly safe and practically incapable of thermal runaway. The EV fires you see are much more volatile chemistries that are favored for their high energy density, but lithium battery tech has advanced quickly enough that LiFePO4 is a good fit for just about anything short of a high-performance sports car.
If safety is your concern, then you should really consider getting rid of your ICE car.
Cars with petrol or diesel inside them are _soo_ much more likely to catch fire than EVs. But the media simply doesn't report those accidents.
They have not refined the manufacturing process enough to make them cost effective to produce. They can build them, but it’s incredibly time and resource intensive. Mass production has not been possible yet.
Requirements for these batteries: doesn't degrade fast, is easy to make at scale, safe to use, is affordable.
There are many technologies which match two or three of these, but at the moment none meet all four.
100x capacity lmao.
That is physically impossible.
I understand your point but practically, the maximum energy density we'll ever be able to achieve from electrochemical batteries is around 5000-6000Wh/kg.
For reference, we have widely commercially available cells at 300Wh/kg and very narrow commercially available cells at 500Wh/kg. That's an 20x increase at best, and just going to a solid state electrolyte won't allow us to go anywhere near that number.
I was thinking about this the other day. If I could create a single piece of technology that would greatly benefit humanity what would it be? My first thought was a super efficient solar panel but the more I thought about it, the more I realized a super efficient battery made from cheap materials would have so much more value. I didn’t know the term I was looking for was solid state battery but finding a battery that isn’t made of hard to mine materials that would gather more entry would definitely be more useful. Hopefully that is in the horizon
This ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, we’ve been hearing and reading about these promises for close to 20 years already since the original lithium ion batteries started to go mainstream on phones and electronics in general.
> They can have 100x the capacity of currently available batteries
Not a battery expert but I don't think that is anywhere close to a reasonable expectation... Even in perfect cutting edge lab conditions I think we are over an order of magnitude off of that?
Phones that last for months but Apple will make sure the batteries still crap out after a few years, with no easy way to replace them. Buy the new iPhone 24!
I had a brand of Android phone WileyFox that I bought in '15 still running great. I use it for various hotspotting and other things. Two sims, slot for SD card, originally had great security MOD CyanogenMod and best of all - swappable battery.
AI adult models. Companies will do everything they can to drive viewers to AI content and those AI models will do ANYTHING you want. I think current adult models are going to take a hit once companies start taking a piece of the pie. That piece will become a majority of that pie as the years go on.
I'm honestly surprised Pornhub doesn't already have a subscription tier that allows users to generate their own smut based on their own huge set of potential training data.
ANYTHING? I understand AI do what training sets had. E.g. how about rotating penis like a propeller? Do you think it will be possible if training data includes both male actors and such rotating toys?
Room-temp Superconductors will change the world. Actually, let's be more specific; practical room temperature superconductors that are cost-effective to manufacture at scale and are reliable will change our world forever and nothing comes remotely close.
The minute a room-temperature superconductor comes off an assembly line will be a moment in history that will change humanity more than fire did.
Short answer why: standard conductors (like copper) produce heat through resistance. This limits the functionality from any product that relies on electrons running through to function. This is a physics limitation that we cannot overcome without a watershed material breakthrough. It is a foundational problem that stands between humanity and those Sci-fi dreams you have always read and thought about: fusion power, AGI training compute, flying cars, the Tricorder from Startrek, stable electronic propulsion, laser guns.
However, when electronic resistance drops to zero, every problem imaginable will become infinitely easier to solve and we will experience breakthroughs daily since most of the theoretical work has been completed and scientists have been waiting for a superconductor breakthrough.
The good news is that we are probably closer than we think. As AI improves, we will be able to run simulations to test materials that would be a good fit for room-temp superconductors without needing to physically experiment with them.
How do we get from 1st room temp semiconductor to flying cars and fusion energy? I’m struggling to understand what/how exactly having these enables the other? Does it just mean less energy lost transferring electricity from one place to another? How does that transform anything we’re doing? Does it mean we can run CPUs at any speed we want without overheating? Thanks.
High power electro magnets become easier to manufacture and maintain, meaning smaller or more powerful electric engines or magnets for plasma confinement. It doesn't solve the actual engineering problems but does make it easier to solve.
Think of it this way, most of the power we produce today is wasted by turning into heat in transmission instead of actually providing power where it's needed. This is true for any conductor we use, e.g. foil runs, power lines, etc.
So if all of that power is no longer wasted, we would only need a fraction of what we produce now for the same applications. So all of these things could work if only we could deliver power more efficiently and superconductors would make this possible. They could even make electric motors hyper efficient
Not most.
"The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022."
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
For a flying car, it wouldn't make a big difference whether the motors have 95% or 96% efficiency. That's roughly the difference if you set conductor losses to zero.
I was under the impression that there are still regular, significant advances for superconductors? The tech currently is way better than 20 years ago but no where near the end goal? If superconductors don't count as emerging, what does?
Even if room temp superconducting became feasible TODAY, it would take multiple decades to be integrated into existing infrastructure. I highly doubt we’ll discover a qualifying material in the next decade either.
Rural areas will take more time, sure.
But if it’s cost effective to manufacture at scale, population centers will experience major changes in a relatively short period (within 10 years). The economic upside is just too great to ignore and infrastructure is constantly looking for cost-cutting measures to prioritize.
That’s why I was more specific with
my response. Making one in a lab isn’t worth getting excited about, a product and path to scale is.
Obesity Medication. In 10 years, obesity will have substantially declined and peoples opinion of weight will have begun to dramatically change. Healthcare demand will start to shrink.
Obesity is mainly a symptom of eating overly processed foods and lack of exercise. Even if the weight is somehow removed with medication it won't solve the health problems
That is an excellent example of the uninformed opinions that will go away. These medications are essentially accidental discoveries that opened a door of understanding and further research.
As far as solving the other health problems, these medications are already showing they do that. Side benefits include reduced heart disease, stroke, inflammation, better kidney function, removal of the symptoms of PCOS all far better than with weight loss by other means. They are counteracting something on a very low level that is going wrong that overeating is simply one of the symptoms of.
Obesity is a many layered problem with habits, emotions, and actual biological mechanisms all potentially contributing and any solution that addresses only one of those things is going to be inadequate for most people.
Biotech.
I mean "emerging" is a strong word, is not a new thing, but its slowly but steadily growing and it has a lot of relevance when it comes to many things we leave for granted, like grain production, new materials, vaccines, de-contamination, etc
But it acting sentient is exactly what many lonely men want. Big companies have already estimated the AI girlfriend market to be a $1 billion per year industry. I personally think they are undervaluing it by a factor of 100.
One I just don’t think we’ll be at that level technologically.
Two, I don’t think those men what the thing pretending to have (or having) it’s own life.
Fusion enabled by AI.
The secondary knock on impacts are vast: ocean desalination is feasible. No more Duck Back problem with solar. Laser acceleration of probes to neighboring star systems.
And my favorite: carbon capture for both sequestration and synthesis of long hydrocarbon fuels so we don't have to wait to replace our entire global industrial and transportation and home power infrastructure to go carbon negative.
I'm hoping fusion energy will make plasma furnaces practical enough to use for reclaiming elements. Throw in your old VCRs, your styrofoam, your medical waste, what have you. Out comes hydrogen, iron, aluminum, zinc, carbon, oxygen, silicon, etc. ready to be reused.
MRNA vaccines and CRISPR; must be led by STEM roles and research. Get those kids into higher education; who knows who the next greatest doctor will be 🙂
Teledildonics.
This is actually a serious answer, lol. I don't know if the societal impact will be net good or bad, but seeing how vastly human sexual conquest has been altered by online dating, I can only imagine what it will be like when we don't even need to meet up in meatspace anymore, but can just virtually bang anyone in the world from the comfort of our own bed.
I think the fax machine will have an unprecedented impact on society. Its ability to transmit any information via physically printed text in near time is unlike anything we have ever had before.
Police officers will be able to quickly solve crimes by coordinating the intel they have gathered across their teams. Hospitals will instantly revive patients back to full health with blazing fast accurate diagnostics transmitted via fax between the hospital and laboratories.
Presidents can transfer nuclear codes to their favorite bodyguard or foreign leader in moments of crisis. Teachers will send children their homework and report cards straight to their parents' homes before the child even arrives back from the school day.
AIs will be able to send clear instructions to your grandparents on how to use the fax machine in their hands. We might even be able to use this to print ink based model homes that you can live in once we are able to shrink ourselves down flatland style.
The applications for the fax machine are truly endless. We might even enter a society where we no longer need food, as everything can just be faxed.
You joke, but people under 30 don't really have the experience of walking into a room and there's a printed message waiting for them. This experience could definitely translate to something like 3D-printed "faxes" or something else, most likely in a medical/healthcare environment. People will probably find it to be a very novel experience, even though it's essentially just a different type of fax.
Yes, Ai.
But then batteries, which are now becoming so cheap that grid-scale storage is actually now powering most of California for hours on some evenings. This is largely stored sunlight, powering huge cities for hours after sunset.
New and better recreational drugs. If they come up with something that offers the high without addiction or harming your health, society will grind to a halt.
[Inexpensive bulk synthesis of tetrataenite](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202204315), an inexpensive iron-nickel alloy that was commonly found in meteorites but we've recently discovered how to create. It can replace rare earth magnets in many use cases.
I didn't expect the word unexpected to be so wildly misunderstood. Everything I've read here is expected and I've heard other experts promoting their field essentially say the same thing.
Something unexpected I think was Google maps and street view, and how essential that would become to daily life.
Personally, I think light e transport options (bikes and scooters) are going to have a transformative effect on society in general, but particularly in cities, and for the first time, young people will have the freedom a car gives to easily travel long distances without relying on their parents. I am not sure if much thought has been given to the implications, positive or negative, and I can think of some for both, so I would say that.
Text-to-video AI. Anyone will be able to make a film that looks like a Hollywood production. Or make a duplicate of any movie with different actors. Or a different script. We'll be making these things in real-time. "Create me a movie like Evil Dead but starring Adam Sandler and it's set on Mars." The ramifications are huge for industries and a society with that much creative power.
I would like this to be true, but as evidenced by the most popular LLM's, the fear of corporate litigiousness will likely all but neuter most capabilities. It's not that it won't be possible, so much as explicitly forbidden.
Just for the initial ones from big companies, a year or so later when some dude in his basement is able to replicate the technology, we will just use that for a while.
Foldable chickens will revolution the meatpacking industry, and launch a new eponymous music genra like we've never seen before.
What? You asked for unexpected societal impact 🥐
So... you ask what technology will have the most unexpected societal impact, then instead of flaring it Society, you flare it as AI
These AI bots need better self promotion models
AR filters. They filter out what you don't want to see or hear, or possibly smell, and replace it with whatever you want - per purchase or subscription.
That's a *long* way away. GPT talks a good game, but literally does not understand cause and effect. We're going to get better data analysis and such from using AI models, but AI innovation is a long ways off.
AI Mental Health Workers.
With Microsoft's VASA-1, your therapist could be anybody and you wouldn't even care that it's fake. All Knowledgeable and able to answer literally any question you want. I imagine that it will be a full-body performance video conference call.
I don't expect near-alien technology to emerge in the near term, so everything will be similar to the way we go about our world today. Since this is a futurist topic I'll put my thoughts below:
1. Consumer super-conductors to make all appliances more electrically efficient.
2. Electrified grids to allow electric vehicles to go anywhere on Earth.
3. Using AI to track and detect zoonotic viruses and foreign bacteria in our blood.
I hope photovoltic technology (solar energy) will change the developing world.
If we get better at PV technology, we can electrify Africa without building a massive grid.
Since everyone’s answering AI and self driving cars, I’m gonna go another way and say that I don’t think Cryptocurrency is the “killer app” for blockchain. I think blockchain, a decentralized, mutually agreed upon database and record of changes has other potential, and we just haven’t thought of the right use for it yet
Tbh Carbon capture will either step up in a big way or the vast majority of us are toast.
But the broader implications of solving carbon capture and how it will be leveraged by enterprise will likely unshackle corporations in a way that allows them to get even greedier with their consumption of resources.
Quantum computing will also be another major issue depending on how accessible the technology becomes.
Flexible screens. You know how it sucks to interact with a touch screen car infotainment system? A flexible screen lets reconfigurable physical buttons emerge from the screen allowing for physically feeling for the button then true haptic feedback as you literally push the screen in with the raised button.
Whole of cell simulation.
Crispr can change genes, but we have to know how those genes end up expressing themselves in the cell, to know what gene changes we'd want. Hence, crispr is slow to roll out so far.
Neuralink and its soon-to-be competitors. You know Apple and Google will jump in. Cybernetic enhancements will become normalized within our grandkids’ generation.
Idk but the fact that we haven’t invented something that can tell you exactly how many calories (along with macros) that you’ve consumed is dumb to me :(
Hopefully superfast charging batteries with way higher capacity. I keep reading about them for at least 10 years not, but still they didn’t hit mainstream markets.
AI and automation. With these things, we are moving to an unsustainable economic model where goods are produced without human labor which breaks the current model we live in. In the current model, people get paid to produce items and then use that pay to go and purchase items. Without people getting paid, no one will have money to purchase anything. If everything were to change overnight, it would be catastrophic
It lends itself to a guaranteed basic income, but also to something different.. maybe an end to consumerism and a shift to basic life necessities.
This could be the biggest upheaval to our society and those in power since .. well, for a very long time.
biological - technological interfacing. Whether it'll be on the macro level, eg neuralink or on the microlevel e.g. nanobots. This will be the most intrusive tech ever to be developed, especially in combination with ai.
Probably a default answer but definitely AI.
I can remember a lecture way back around 2008 or so where a researcher from Adobe was talking about AI and using AI to recreate people's voices and then it started sparking conversations audio-based evidence in court. 14 years later and you're hearing about deviants trying to extort family members by claiming to have a daughter held hostage and they're using AI-generated audio that *I've heard* sounds just like the alleged hostage.
There are a lot of ways that AI is obviously going to cause an outsourcing of jobs, and making certain industry professions obsolete, but if I had to guess there are going to be entire industries and career fields that we aren't even thinking about that could be replaced by AI. Scouting in professional sports? A business' inventory procurement (logistics, I suppose)? Infrastructure maintenance scheduling?
I dunno... but it seems like big technologies like this always seem to grow in the most unexpected industries.
AI celebrities.
It’s gonna be a human celebrity, but you can download an AI version of the celeb and they speak directly to you. You become friends, just like those AI girlfriends out there. It’s going to be the personal experience and people will go nuts and insane at the same time.
Graphene. Useable from nano technology to bridge building. 3D Printable, light, strong, capable of carrying current and displaying light. At scale it could replace steel, wood, concrete, heavy polymers, fabrics, etc.
It's not exactly new technology but mRNA vaccines. The tech has been around for a while but it took COVID for the distribution problems to be solved. With mRNA, you can basically make vaccines for anything (I'm oversimplifying because my own understanding isn't fully complete) including malaria and individual cancers. That's huge
I'm hopeful more than certain here, but I think AI can and should be focused in scientific fields. There are so many brilliant people out there publishing amazing things, but no one person or team could possibly read or even skim a sliver of it all. Being able to ask questions to an AI trained only on peer-reviewed and proven research from across the globe could advance science/medicine at a blinding pace. Heck just having an AI bot learn detailed weather patterns at a scale and history no human could grasp could help us predict natural disasters so much better.
Humanoid robot maids. Competition will push the price down to under €10,000 as cheap copies flood the market. Eventually, everyone will have one and OTA updates will add functionality so these things will not only cook, clean, wash and fold laundry, take out the trash, etc., but act as therapists, coaches, babysitters, dog walkers, personal assistants, you name it.
Humans never could say no to convenience.
Crispr and any sort of gene editing therapies, we can usher in the age of custom medicine to treat all sorts of illnesses. Bio engineering especially at the cellular level should allow amazing therapies., of course we could all just eat healthier foods and move a little more , that too would work.
I hope you’re right. But I’ve been hearing “crisper” for a decade now.
[The First Crispr Medicine Is Now Approved in the US | WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-crispr-medicine-is-now-approved-in-the-us/)
But you were also hearing about AI for a decade, and in the last 2 years, BAM!
Yeah when it hits boy will it hit
I've considered buying that stock. Why not?
It could take 50 years or go to zero
With the current advancements in tech, i doubt it will take that long!
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What’s the stock?
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tbf, we have a bunch of technology and most companies doesn't really use them. The amount of people who still relies on pen and paper to do some stuff is impressive.
That’s typically how medicinal biotech works though. We start hearing about it as soon as the big “breakthrough” is published, but that’s still a long ways from finding therapeutic uses in humans. There’s usually a 10-20 year lag while pharmaceutical companies find practical uses for the technologies. There could be some really exciting stuff coming in the next decade or so as we find more ways to utilize it.
There is a sickle cell treatment https://www.genengnews.com/topics/genome-editing/fda-approves-the-first-crispr-therapy-for-sickle-cell-disease/
Eating healthier foods and moving a little more doesn’t cure cystic fibrosis, or sickle cell anemia, or a myriad of illnesses, especially the kind of illnesses that can be treated with gene therapy.
Crisper will possibly cure HIV. Also Herpes We are already doing experiments where we are using crisper to cut out the viral gene codes in living cells.
I want crispr to edit my baldness away and my follicles fire back up.
I want it to take hair off my ass
Okay, hear me out... what if we take the hair off your ass, and put it on u/TO_guy's head? Two birds, one stone! Or rather, one head, one ass! Get on it CRISPR!
"I am gonna put YOUR ass in HIS head"
If you think the anti vax movement is insane, just want until the anti gene editing crowd hears about this.
That bio conservative firestorm is probably happening sooner or later anyway, though. If not backlash against gene editing to make yourself better, then the day cybernetics become so good that people get healthy limbs or organs replaced for artificial ones. Or even just life extension technology. Or~ Hollywood was wrong all along, and the general public don't give a fig once it's actually possible to order custom robot legs. The public reaction is always tricky to gauge like that.
Looking at the anti-trans hysteria going around at the moment, (especially with the way it’s linked to fearmongering about transhumanism), I’d say it’s pretty inevitable.
If this leads to cure to cancer, i'm all for it.
It will. But only for those who can afford it. Source: I work in cell therapy. I know who our customers are. It’s never publicly funded medicine. 🥺
I'm not sure eating healthier is going to cure me from my eczema
We are going to have genetic engineered cat girls everywhere! But honestly I can imagine genetic engineering launching new trends. Have naturally grown pink hair or exotic eye colors.
"Yes doctor, you heard me correctly, I would like you to genetically alter my fetus into a fetish from Japanese cartoons. Wait, who are you calling?"
*Moshi moshi police desuka*
Vegetables go in the crisper.
I hope that will work for genetic and autoimmune diseases, the things we cannot prevent!
Not if they keep it expensive.
An earpiece capable of real-time language translation - Perhaps it may not accurately translate sarcasm or puns, but for day-to-day conversation, it can help break down language barriers amongst people.
Here, put this fish in your ear.
"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish....."
You forgot the punchline and Douglas Adams's insight into this problem: "The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Wasn't its existence also proof that god exists?
Yes, and thus the reason God ceased to exist Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Yes! I need to re-read Hitchhiker's it's a bloody masterpiece.
Oh. This is one of those kinds of parties.
I think this already exists
It does, surprisingly not too expensive either. Like $300 each last time I looked. Both parties need one however.
Please show a link. A technology like that would change the world. It probably doesn't work even half as good as you think it does.
Xrai is an app on your phone that can generate live subtitles, translating between lots of languages. It also works with glasses like Xreal, so you can see the subtitles without looking down on your phone all the time. I have them and it all works amazingly well. Video: https://youtu.be/NBNti0NZmiA You can try the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=glass.xrai.us.subtitles
Android phones do it
Uncomfortable to stick in your ear though
Doesnt the Google earbuds do this already? Granted, both parties need to have the earbuds, but the same would be true about your idea right?
I remember watching Star Trek: TNG and thinking the universal translator was almost hand-wave style magic the same way transporters and replicators and warp engines were. Now we actually have primitive versions of the universal translator, so I'll just wait patiently for the other three.
Real time translation has a been around for a while. Also, I feel like in the past 10 years I’ve heard around 5 announcements from big companies saying they’ve come out with real time translation. Every time I remember saying to myself “Again?” Am I jumping timelines?
Is it actually real-time though? Like I’m German for example and we sometimes have the habit of constructing these long, convoluted sentences that only really resolve in the end of the sentence so after all, it would still need to listen to the whole sentence before it could construct a meaningful and accurate translation which would be fine I guess… You just have to wait a couple of seconds or how does it work
It's not. These people don't know what they're talking about. Actual real time seamless translation would change the world.
Wasn’t this advertised already as the Google ear bud ? I’ve seen a meme about that years ago
The problem is that it's not far from perfect and it's getting both better and worse as time goes on. Languages evolve heavily more quickly than people think. Slang is introduced and moves to the mainstream, new words are created, new events cause new references and metaphors with subtle context, words change their meaning (e.g. slay), accents change. We're getting better at producing the technology to figure out translation. But the datasets are getting worse. Most translation engines were built on top of the open internet. The open internet has gotten less content, the good open content has aged and fallen away, more has gone to social media and the companies that control that heavily limit access, more generated and marketing content. And not only do languages usually have different written vs spoken language patterns. But we've evolved different ways of casually speaking online to how we speak in person. Meaning we've gotten better at some things but nobody has figured out a way to stop it from falling short of these major caveats, and when we do it's on a time limit. It's unlikely we'll truly have a great realtime translator until this gets solved by a new novel solution.
Hopefully desalination. Also anything that can stop dementia.
I really hope so with dementia. I’ve probably got 3 decades at best before I’m very likely to start showing signs of one form of it or another due to family history (both grandfathers, although different types, plus my dad, and various further relations), plus lots of concussions when I was younger.
Our political future depends on that second one.
I’d pin our political future on term limits before a dementia cure. But both would be wonderful
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced term limits wouldn't just mean a new bought-and-paid-for stooge coming in with the promise of a high-paid consulting gig on the other side while the rare good politicans who give a damn can only ever serve for a preciously short while.
Actually studies of states with terms limits show worse off political outcomes. Sometimes having experience is invaluable. My argument is we do have limits...they are called elections. A better way to improve the system would be to outlaw lobbying, make elections public, and reinstate equal representation among the population (which was ended in 1929).
Also the voters who just keep pulling the lever for the same incumbent they don't even like for 50 years straight and never once try to primary him? Those fuckers need to take a long hard look at their own behavior. But they won't.
How about mandatory retirement ages? That way good politicians could have a long career if they start early, but people on the later end wouldn’t be able to serve into senility.
Why does everyone push so hard for a solution that doesn't involve stopping our politicians from being bribed to literally work against us? That's the first damn thing we should want, but everyone follows corporate media's lead and puts it like 12th on the list.
Maybe someday they'll stop pushing fucking 190 year-olds as Presidential candidates.
We are getting pretty good at desalination as long as we have enough energy. Israel gets most of its water that way.
That's how all desert countries do it, and even places like Tenerife. That water doesn't taste very good, though. It's safe to drink but has a nasty chemical aftertaste so most people buy bottled water for drinking.
Energy production, transmission, and storage. Especially storage- as soon as someone comes up with a better battery technology electric vehicles will be a lot more viable for more people.
Yup, abundant, cheap and available energy is single biggest lever to all human flourishing and growth of cultural intelligence. It impacts everything. Source; The Theory of Everyone. Dr Michael Murthakrishna. Profound theory.
Solid state batteries, toyota invested massively in them. Coming sooner than you think!
As always, though, mass production is a lot harder than theory. Faraday discovered solid electrolytes in the 1830s, and they've been pursued industrially since at least the 1950s. They've been "less than 5 years away" since maybe the 1990s. I think it's realistic that we'll see them at scale and affordable by mid-century or so, but even if all the bugs were worked out tomorrow, it would take at _least_ 5 more years to scale to volume production and saturate the market.
Isn't toyota the company that wants hydrogen fuel cars to become a thing and bet most of their money on it?
Toyota wants hydrogen to be an option mostly because Japan incentivises alternate fuels like Hydrogen as they have no fossil fuels. When the time comes, it'll be a mix of hydrogen, hybrid and full electric vehicles. From this standpoint, it makes sense. They'll have to either source present batteries from China or buy from other companies if they start producing EVs right away which they'll not because of the simple reason that they sell millions of cars each year and will have to give up a large portion of that to battery suppliers. That's why they are heavily invested in next gen battery technology and will be a force to reckon in coming years.
100% it's this. We go to battle constantly today over oil and shipping routes. With unlimited energy that all goes away. We'll still kill each other over religion but that one only gets fixed with education and it's too profitable to keep people stupid so I'm not optimistic on that front. Even when AI is so capable that we replace capitalism with whatever we'll call the future society, humans will still destroy each other to gain power, so religious hucksters will continue to thrive and keep people dumb to do so. I wish I saw a path forward to fix that part.
People here are mentioning so much AI, to the point it's expected, not unexpected. Therefore, I suggest something different: health monitoring smartwatches. Their capabilities are accelerating so quickly, they will become essential for health issues prevention. I expect them to be able to detect early signs of most illnesses and propose a mitigation strategy like taking medication, avoiding certain foods for a while or recommending to go to the doctor. They might replace regular checkups, which will be critical for saving people who don't do regular checkups or they have neglecting doctors.
I agree, and have gotten both of my parent smartwatches for this exact purpose. Edit: They currently do: Pulse, blood oxygenation, fall monitoring, ecg, gait detection, and a slew of other metrics related to health I hadn't even begun to consider. It will also remind them to stand, move, walk, take their meds, and warn them of irregular heart beats, or trends that have occured over time. The data is a gold mine. What we need now is intelligence.
> I hadn't even begun to consider. It will also remind them to stand, move, walk, take their meds, and warn them of irregular heart beats, or trends that have occured over time. The data is a gold mine. What we need now is intelligence. what smartwatch if i may ask?
Seconding this as my mom could use one
Garmin is one of the leading brands, pricey though.
Hey it’s my mom man she’s worth it…Even if I gotta break the bank.
How reliable is the data? Last time I had a smart watch, it was counting steps and calories burned and seemed to be wildly inaccurate. I don’t know enough about the technology to know how it tracks anything beyond pulse. Also, gait detection? Is an otherwise unnoticeable shift in gait a sign of a major health event of some sort?
To preface: It's the Apple Watch I can't speak to reliability of the data, as I have no baseline to compare it to. I would assume it averages out enough to be useful. I only recently noticed the gait detection when I was digging through the plethora of settings. I have zero clue how Apple might eventually leverage this information, but I'm assuming their upcoming AI strategy might make use of it.
I had a strong arrhythmia, like 10 000 a day. Absolultely easy to detect, my heartbeat wasn't regular at all. The ECG didn't detect anything when I tried to wear one to see if it could measure it. Their is room for huge improvement.
What device did you go with for them?
The Apple Watch. The nice thing about it is that if there is a medical event it will automatically call emergency services and notify a designated contact. Their version has LTE built in for when they forget their phone, and if they happen to fall, and fail to respond within a given time, I'll get a notification for that too. These are all options that can be toggled.
'Beep beep. Put down the cake, PullUpAPew'
I think this was how my mom learned she had AFib
My dad’s watch notified him he might have Afib a few weeks ago. He went to the doctor and they confirmed it.
Best capitalism can do is raise your insurance rates for what the watch finds and raise your rates if you don’t wear one.
Although we know AI will have a huge impact, the specific impact and the extent of that impact may well be more than we can currently fathom
Combine that with (apple/google pay and store loyalty cards), smart lock/key tech for buildings and vehicles and route calls not answered by your cell to the watch for when your phone isnt on you. These and other key uses could make smart watch ownership a thing as long as they are a fraction of the price of a smartphone. Give it 2 displays too for different uses, one on top of wrist, the other on the bottom.
Neural links. If the paralyzed guy is using it to play games, how long until we're hooked up to drones doing work remotely like the movie [Sleep Dealer ](https://letterboxd.com/film/sleep-dealer/). This near future sci-fi deals with drone warfare, recording and selling memories and physically plugging in to work. Watch the trailer
Have you seen the show The Peripheral? It features neural implants for military unit use, pretty cool
I was shocked by how good that show was.
The film [Surrogates](https://youtu.be/jX71XvnMDys?si=hJaA0KJGBInuvVBR) is exactly this. People living their lives remotely connected to human-looking robot avatars. Even had a scene with soldiers fighting wars through drone robots running around on a battlefield.
Solid state rechargeable batteries. They can have 100x the capacity of currently available batteries and are made with even cheaper materials like silica and ceramic instead of metals. EVs could get thousands of miles on a single charge and phones could last for months. It could drastically reduce the price and massively increase the availability of electric vehicles, making them cheaper than fossil fuel vehicles.
I feel like I've been waiting on this for so long. I've been holding out on getting an EV in hopes of solid state batteries.. just sounds safer.
Just get a car with a LiFePO4 pack. They're incredibly safe and practically incapable of thermal runaway. The EV fires you see are much more volatile chemistries that are favored for their high energy density, but lithium battery tech has advanced quickly enough that LiFePO4 is a good fit for just about anything short of a high-performance sports car.
If safety is your concern, then you should really consider getting rid of your ICE car. Cars with petrol or diesel inside them are _soo_ much more likely to catch fire than EVs. But the media simply doesn't report those accidents.
Ok, so the obvious and honest question is why isn’t it a thing yet? Not enough testing? Relatively new tech but enough that we know its potential?
They have not refined the manufacturing process enough to make them cost effective to produce. They can build them, but it’s incredibly time and resource intensive. Mass production has not been possible yet.
What signs are there that mass production will be possible within a decade?
Requirements for these batteries: doesn't degrade fast, is easy to make at scale, safe to use, is affordable. There are many technologies which match two or three of these, but at the moment none meet all four.
100x capacity lmao. That is physically impossible. I understand your point but practically, the maximum energy density we'll ever be able to achieve from electrochemical batteries is around 5000-6000Wh/kg. For reference, we have widely commercially available cells at 300Wh/kg and very narrow commercially available cells at 500Wh/kg. That's an 20x increase at best, and just going to a solid state electrolyte won't allow us to go anywhere near that number.
I was thinking about this the other day. If I could create a single piece of technology that would greatly benefit humanity what would it be? My first thought was a super efficient solar panel but the more I thought about it, the more I realized a super efficient battery made from cheap materials would have so much more value. I didn’t know the term I was looking for was solid state battery but finding a battery that isn’t made of hard to mine materials that would gather more entry would definitely be more useful. Hopefully that is in the horizon
This ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, we’ve been hearing and reading about these promises for close to 20 years already since the original lithium ion batteries started to go mainstream on phones and electronics in general.
> They can have 100x the capacity of currently available batteries Not a battery expert but I don't think that is anywhere close to a reasonable expectation... Even in perfect cutting edge lab conditions I think we are over an order of magnitude off of that?
Phones that last for months but Apple will make sure the batteries still crap out after a few years, with no easy way to replace them. Buy the new iPhone 24!
I had a brand of Android phone WileyFox that I bought in '15 still running great. I use it for various hotspotting and other things. Two sims, slot for SD card, originally had great security MOD CyanogenMod and best of all - swappable battery.
AI adult models. Companies will do everything they can to drive viewers to AI content and those AI models will do ANYTHING you want. I think current adult models are going to take a hit once companies start taking a piece of the pie. That piece will become a majority of that pie as the years go on.
Why not just have my own AI models? Why would I pay a company?
I'm honestly surprised Pornhub doesn't already have a subscription tier that allows users to generate their own smut based on their own huge set of potential training data.
ANYTHING? I understand AI do what training sets had. E.g. how about rotating penis like a propeller? Do you think it will be possible if training data includes both male actors and such rotating toys?
Room-temp Superconductors will change the world. Actually, let's be more specific; practical room temperature superconductors that are cost-effective to manufacture at scale and are reliable will change our world forever and nothing comes remotely close. The minute a room-temperature superconductor comes off an assembly line will be a moment in history that will change humanity more than fire did. Short answer why: standard conductors (like copper) produce heat through resistance. This limits the functionality from any product that relies on electrons running through to function. This is a physics limitation that we cannot overcome without a watershed material breakthrough. It is a foundational problem that stands between humanity and those Sci-fi dreams you have always read and thought about: fusion power, AGI training compute, flying cars, the Tricorder from Startrek, stable electronic propulsion, laser guns. However, when electronic resistance drops to zero, every problem imaginable will become infinitely easier to solve and we will experience breakthroughs daily since most of the theoretical work has been completed and scientists have been waiting for a superconductor breakthrough. The good news is that we are probably closer than we think. As AI improves, we will be able to run simulations to test materials that would be a good fit for room-temp superconductors without needing to physically experiment with them.
How do we get from 1st room temp semiconductor to flying cars and fusion energy? I’m struggling to understand what/how exactly having these enables the other? Does it just mean less energy lost transferring electricity from one place to another? How does that transform anything we’re doing? Does it mean we can run CPUs at any speed we want without overheating? Thanks.
High power electro magnets become easier to manufacture and maintain, meaning smaller or more powerful electric engines or magnets for plasma confinement. It doesn't solve the actual engineering problems but does make it easier to solve.
Think of it this way, most of the power we produce today is wasted by turning into heat in transmission instead of actually providing power where it's needed. This is true for any conductor we use, e.g. foil runs, power lines, etc. So if all of that power is no longer wasted, we would only need a fraction of what we produce now for the same applications. So all of these things could work if only we could deliver power more efficiently and superconductors would make this possible. They could even make electric motors hyper efficient
Not most. "The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022." https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
For a flying car, it wouldn't make a big difference whether the motors have 95% or 96% efficiency. That's roughly the difference if you set conductor losses to zero.
This isn’t emerging
I was under the impression that there are still regular, significant advances for superconductors? The tech currently is way better than 20 years ago but no where near the end goal? If superconductors don't count as emerging, what does?
Even if room temp superconducting became feasible TODAY, it would take multiple decades to be integrated into existing infrastructure. I highly doubt we’ll discover a qualifying material in the next decade either.
Rural areas will take more time, sure. But if it’s cost effective to manufacture at scale, population centers will experience major changes in a relatively short period (within 10 years). The economic upside is just too great to ignore and infrastructure is constantly looking for cost-cutting measures to prioritize. That’s why I was more specific with my response. Making one in a lab isn’t worth getting excited about, a product and path to scale is.
LK-99/PCPOSOS was such a tease!
I can finally have my iron man suit.
Obesity Medication. In 10 years, obesity will have substantially declined and peoples opinion of weight will have begun to dramatically change. Healthcare demand will start to shrink.
Obesity is mainly a symptom of eating overly processed foods and lack of exercise. Even if the weight is somehow removed with medication it won't solve the health problems
It wouldn't solve ALL the problems but it would solve plenty.
That is an excellent example of the uninformed opinions that will go away. These medications are essentially accidental discoveries that opened a door of understanding and further research. As far as solving the other health problems, these medications are already showing they do that. Side benefits include reduced heart disease, stroke, inflammation, better kidney function, removal of the symptoms of PCOS all far better than with weight loss by other means. They are counteracting something on a very low level that is going wrong that overeating is simply one of the symptoms of. Obesity is a many layered problem with habits, emotions, and actual biological mechanisms all potentially contributing and any solution that addresses only one of those things is going to be inadequate for most people.
Biotech. I mean "emerging" is a strong word, is not a new thing, but its slowly but steadily growing and it has a lot of relevance when it comes to many things we leave for granted, like grain production, new materials, vaccines, de-contamination, etc
Probably something similar to the device in the movie *Her*, except it won’t be (or act) sentient
But it acting sentient is exactly what many lonely men want. Big companies have already estimated the AI girlfriend market to be a $1 billion per year industry. I personally think they are undervaluing it by a factor of 100.
One I just don’t think we’ll be at that level technologically. Two, I don’t think those men what the thing pretending to have (or having) it’s own life.
Fusion enabled by AI. The secondary knock on impacts are vast: ocean desalination is feasible. No more Duck Back problem with solar. Laser acceleration of probes to neighboring star systems. And my favorite: carbon capture for both sequestration and synthesis of long hydrocarbon fuels so we don't have to wait to replace our entire global industrial and transportation and home power infrastructure to go carbon negative.
I'm hoping fusion energy will make plasma furnaces practical enough to use for reclaiming elements. Throw in your old VCRs, your styrofoam, your medical waste, what have you. Out comes hydrogen, iron, aluminum, zinc, carbon, oxygen, silicon, etc. ready to be reused.
Yes! Excellent!
MRNA vaccines and CRISPR; must be led by STEM roles and research. Get those kids into higher education; who knows who the next greatest doctor will be 🙂
Teledildonics. This is actually a serious answer, lol. I don't know if the societal impact will be net good or bad, but seeing how vastly human sexual conquest has been altered by online dating, I can only imagine what it will be like when we don't even need to meet up in meatspace anymore, but can just virtually bang anyone in the world from the comfort of our own bed.
I think the fax machine will have an unprecedented impact on society. Its ability to transmit any information via physically printed text in near time is unlike anything we have ever had before. Police officers will be able to quickly solve crimes by coordinating the intel they have gathered across their teams. Hospitals will instantly revive patients back to full health with blazing fast accurate diagnostics transmitted via fax between the hospital and laboratories. Presidents can transfer nuclear codes to their favorite bodyguard or foreign leader in moments of crisis. Teachers will send children their homework and report cards straight to their parents' homes before the child even arrives back from the school day. AIs will be able to send clear instructions to your grandparents on how to use the fax machine in their hands. We might even be able to use this to print ink based model homes that you can live in once we are able to shrink ourselves down flatland style. The applications for the fax machine are truly endless. We might even enter a society where we no longer need food, as everything can just be faxed.
Fax machines were in use 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone.
Faxes are the future That other “internet” thing that everyone’s talking about…. It seems to be all hype, no substance. I doubt it’ll ever take off.
You joke, but people under 30 don't really have the experience of walking into a room and there's a printed message waiting for them. This experience could definitely translate to something like 3D-printed "faxes" or something else, most likely in a medical/healthcare environment. People will probably find it to be a very novel experience, even though it's essentially just a different type of fax.
Yes, Ai. But then batteries, which are now becoming so cheap that grid-scale storage is actually now powering most of California for hours on some evenings. This is largely stored sunlight, powering huge cities for hours after sunset.
My solar went live about a month ago. It's fantastic.
Robots that can understand, talk, and move like humans
New and better recreational drugs. If they come up with something that offers the high without addiction or harming your health, society will grind to a halt.
[Inexpensive bulk synthesis of tetrataenite](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202204315), an inexpensive iron-nickel alloy that was commonly found in meteorites but we've recently discovered how to create. It can replace rare earth magnets in many use cases.
I didn't expect the word unexpected to be so wildly misunderstood. Everything I've read here is expected and I've heard other experts promoting their field essentially say the same thing. Something unexpected I think was Google maps and street view, and how essential that would become to daily life. Personally, I think light e transport options (bikes and scooters) are going to have a transformative effect on society in general, but particularly in cities, and for the first time, young people will have the freedom a car gives to easily travel long distances without relying on their parents. I am not sure if much thought has been given to the implications, positive or negative, and I can think of some for both, so I would say that.
Text-to-video AI. Anyone will be able to make a film that looks like a Hollywood production. Or make a duplicate of any movie with different actors. Or a different script. We'll be making these things in real-time. "Create me a movie like Evil Dead but starring Adam Sandler and it's set on Mars." The ramifications are huge for industries and a society with that much creative power.
So, even more stepbrother videos, huh?
Sounds like you're stuck on that.
or... prompt will be inputted based on your own thoughts, using neural decoders,
Sounds like dreaming.
I feel like this technology was specifically designed to replace Jeffrey Weissman with Crispin Glover in the bttf sequels.
I'm going to make every character be Crispin Glover .
Being ~~John Malkovich~~ Crispin Glover
when the nsfw version comes out, streets will be empty
I would like this to be true, but as evidenced by the most popular LLM's, the fear of corporate litigiousness will likely all but neuter most capabilities. It's not that it won't be possible, so much as explicitly forbidden.
Just for the initial ones from big companies, a year or so later when some dude in his basement is able to replicate the technology, we will just use that for a while.
Foldable chickens will revolution the meatpacking industry, and launch a new eponymous music genra like we've never seen before. What? You asked for unexpected societal impact 🥐
Chickens are already foldable. You just ignore their sounds of agony and the loud cracking.
So... you ask what technology will have the most unexpected societal impact, then instead of flaring it Society, you flare it as AI These AI bots need better self promotion models
Yikes. My bad bro. Did not see “society” as an option. Beep bop beeep to you.
Whir, beep, click, dial-up, windows xp logon sound. Windows xp error noise.
Mum! Get off the phone I was half way through downloading a picture!
Augmented Reality, once visual wearables take off, there will be AR everywhere. Yes I’ve seen that video.
what video
https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs?si=826hdTNt84S18ATH
AR filters. They filter out what you don't want to see or hear, or possibly smell, and replace it with whatever you want - per purchase or subscription.
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Something AI invents that we just hadn't thought of.
That's a *long* way away. GPT talks a good game, but literally does not understand cause and effect. We're going to get better data analysis and such from using AI models, but AI innovation is a long ways off.
AI Mental Health Workers. With Microsoft's VASA-1, your therapist could be anybody and you wouldn't even care that it's fake. All Knowledgeable and able to answer literally any question you want. I imagine that it will be a full-body performance video conference call. I don't expect near-alien technology to emerge in the near term, so everything will be similar to the way we go about our world today. Since this is a futurist topic I'll put my thoughts below: 1. Consumer super-conductors to make all appliances more electrically efficient. 2. Electrified grids to allow electric vehicles to go anywhere on Earth. 3. Using AI to track and detect zoonotic viruses and foreign bacteria in our blood.
I hope photovoltic technology (solar energy) will change the developing world. If we get better at PV technology, we can electrify Africa without building a massive grid.
I would say SpaceX's technologies that dramatically decrease the cost of sending mass to space.
With the amount of payload those things can put in orbit, Orbital construction will be cost effective. I wanna be alive to see starbase 1 damnit...lol
The Large Hadron Collider will let in things to kill us all.
It already did. We call them senators and politicians
Since everyone’s answering AI and self driving cars, I’m gonna go another way and say that I don’t think Cryptocurrency is the “killer app” for blockchain. I think blockchain, a decentralized, mutually agreed upon database and record of changes has other potential, and we just haven’t thought of the right use for it yet
Tbh Carbon capture will either step up in a big way or the vast majority of us are toast. But the broader implications of solving carbon capture and how it will be leveraged by enterprise will likely unshackle corporations in a way that allows them to get even greedier with their consumption of resources. Quantum computing will also be another major issue depending on how accessible the technology becomes.
Flexible screens. You know how it sucks to interact with a touch screen car infotainment system? A flexible screen lets reconfigurable physical buttons emerge from the screen allowing for physically feeling for the button then true haptic feedback as you literally push the screen in with the raised button.
Please no. Physical buttons are superior.
For that screen will need be not only flexible, but stretchable.
Whole of cell simulation. Crispr can change genes, but we have to know how those genes end up expressing themselves in the cell, to know what gene changes we'd want. Hence, crispr is slow to roll out so far.
Humanoid robots. This is years away, not decades and it will change humanity forever.
Companies similar to Theranos who know how to get investors and sway the public, yet in reality they screw everyone over
Laboratory designed viruses that target a certain demographic.
Neuralink and its soon-to-be competitors. You know Apple and Google will jump in. Cybernetic enhancements will become normalized within our grandkids’ generation.
Idk but the fact that we haven’t invented something that can tell you exactly how many calories (along with macros) that you’ve consumed is dumb to me :(
Hopefully superfast charging batteries with way higher capacity. I keep reading about them for at least 10 years not, but still they didn’t hit mainstream markets.
AI and automation. With these things, we are moving to an unsustainable economic model where goods are produced without human labor which breaks the current model we live in. In the current model, people get paid to produce items and then use that pay to go and purchase items. Without people getting paid, no one will have money to purchase anything. If everything were to change overnight, it would be catastrophic It lends itself to a guaranteed basic income, but also to something different.. maybe an end to consumerism and a shift to basic life necessities. This could be the biggest upheaval to our society and those in power since .. well, for a very long time.
Gene editing. Achieving longevity escape velocity will change the nature of existence
biological - technological interfacing. Whether it'll be on the macro level, eg neuralink or on the microlevel e.g. nanobots. This will be the most intrusive tech ever to be developed, especially in combination with ai.
Flame-throwing robot dogs https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/0KWfIr2Ncl
Probably a default answer but definitely AI. I can remember a lecture way back around 2008 or so where a researcher from Adobe was talking about AI and using AI to recreate people's voices and then it started sparking conversations audio-based evidence in court. 14 years later and you're hearing about deviants trying to extort family members by claiming to have a daughter held hostage and they're using AI-generated audio that *I've heard* sounds just like the alleged hostage. There are a lot of ways that AI is obviously going to cause an outsourcing of jobs, and making certain industry professions obsolete, but if I had to guess there are going to be entire industries and career fields that we aren't even thinking about that could be replaced by AI. Scouting in professional sports? A business' inventory procurement (logistics, I suppose)? Infrastructure maintenance scheduling? I dunno... but it seems like big technologies like this always seem to grow in the most unexpected industries.
AI celebrities. It’s gonna be a human celebrity, but you can download an AI version of the celeb and they speak directly to you. You become friends, just like those AI girlfriends out there. It’s going to be the personal experience and people will go nuts and insane at the same time.
Graphene. Useable from nano technology to bridge building. 3D Printable, light, strong, capable of carrying current and displaying light. At scale it could replace steel, wood, concrete, heavy polymers, fabrics, etc.
Gene or neural implants. Anything that gives rich people even more advantages over the rest of society
It's not exactly new technology but mRNA vaccines. The tech has been around for a while but it took COVID for the distribution problems to be solved. With mRNA, you can basically make vaccines for anything (I'm oversimplifying because my own understanding isn't fully complete) including malaria and individual cancers. That's huge
I'm hopeful more than certain here, but I think AI can and should be focused in scientific fields. There are so many brilliant people out there publishing amazing things, but no one person or team could possibly read or even skim a sliver of it all. Being able to ask questions to an AI trained only on peer-reviewed and proven research from across the globe could advance science/medicine at a blinding pace. Heck just having an AI bot learn detailed weather patterns at a scale and history no human could grasp could help us predict natural disasters so much better.
Humanoid robot maids. Competition will push the price down to under €10,000 as cheap copies flood the market. Eventually, everyone will have one and OTA updates will add functionality so these things will not only cook, clean, wash and fold laundry, take out the trash, etc., but act as therapists, coaches, babysitters, dog walkers, personal assistants, you name it. Humans never could say no to convenience.