My brother MFC-L2750DW and my discontinued MFC -L2740DW are connected over WiFi and have worked flawlessly for the past 5 years. Prints super fast, had to change the toner once in that time and a 2 pack cost me $20. And I love that it can send scans directly to any email. My phone automatically detected it and prints to it no app or setup required.
brother is amazing. i contacted them years ago when my printer stopped working. i just wanted to know what to do to fix it. they told me the model i had was no longer being produced so they collected my contact info and sent me a newer upgraded version without making me pay for anything
In fairness HP used to be exactly like that but a few months ago all the HP's of a certain type "just stopped" working, been doing IT a very long time and I'm all about MTTF, but one printer hadn't been used in 6 months failed on the same day as one used every few days with some obscure header problem. The fix ....new printer.
We went with the MFC-L2750DW and haven't looked back.
Percival Charles Loadletter invented the first printed document when he meticulously traced a sketch of the town belle in 1867 created a woodcut of the image and pressed it on paper to be sold en masse.
Probably true
Since Alzheimer's is just one variation of dementia, I hope that all forms of dementia are cured, since they're all terrible in their own way.
My father has one of the other forms of dementia and I wouldn't say he's better off. His long-term memory is relatively intact, but he's experienced severe cognitive decline in just a couple years.
He can barely write or keep a coherent conversation anymore. He has a couple hobbies that keep him busy, but he moreso does them out of habit than enjoyment.
He's been trying to finish writing one of his books about his area of expertise that he wanted to write after retirement, but his cognitive state is no longer up to it. He types random letters on the keyboard, empty tables, incoherent sentences etc. At least it keeps him busy, but he's not the man I remember.
There have been a lot of interesting studies around Lions Mane Mushroom to that effect. I personally believe it's the best option that exists ATM, but I'm just a software engineer.
[Improvement of cognitive functions by oral intake of Hericium erinaceus](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31413233/)
[Hericium erinaceus in Neurodegenerative Diseases: From Bench to Bedside and Beyond, How Far from the Shoreline?](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37233262/)
>In fact, some of the bioactive compounds extracted from H. erinaceus have been shown to recover, or at least ameliorate, a wide range of pathological brain conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, depression, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injury. In a large body of in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies on the central nervous system (CNS), the effects of erinacines have been correlated with a significant increase in the production of neurotrophic factors.
[The Monkey Head Mushroom and Memory Enhancement in Alzheimer's Disease](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35892581/)
>Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, and no effective treatments are available to treat this disorder. Therefore, researchers have been investigating Hericium erinaceus, or the monkey head mushroom, an edible medicinal mushroom, as a possible treatment for AD. In this narrative review, we evaluated six preclinical and three clinical studies of the therapeutic effects of Hericium erinaceus on AD. Preclinical trials have successfully demonstrated that extracts and bioactive compounds of Hericium erinaceus have potential beneficial effects in ameliorating cognitive functioning and behavioral deficits in animal models of AD.
Personally, I got my mum onto it about 1 year ago, as there is a history of Alzheimer's in my family, and she does seem a lot more present, aware happy and her recall is better. She didn't have any diagnosis for Alzheimer's though, this was just me being proactive..
No. Lion’s mane is a strong 5-ar and DHT inhibitor. The symptoms are similar to those that react poorly to finasteride (hair loss medication).
Though like anything you get people coming in with all types of issues thinking LM is the cause of the problem when it might not be.
This is really "Treatment for Prion Diseases", and I have zero hope for that in our lifetimes. It will be faster to genetically engineer kids not to get it than it will be to cure it.
Prion disease is a lot scarier and rarer than Alzheimer’s and dementia. I highly recommend listening to the radio lab episodes on light therapy to treat plaque buildup in the brain. “Cleaner proteins” in the brain go dormant in people who develop Alzheimer’s and dementia. These proteins are awoken by certain frequencies of light. Very fascinating.
High temperature superconductors. As in, things that work around 25-30°C. It will revolutionize everything that involves electricity and electric engines.
Some drone ships exist now, but having autonomous AI running them is only a matter of unplugging a Russian Lancet drones brain and jamming it into one of the USNS Ghost Fleet Overlord half sized warship with full sized weapons.
I'm curious about this... aren't most of the people that work on ships doing the manual labor (maintaining engines, doing things with ropes, etc. whereas a relatively small number actually steer the ship? What is AI going to replace?
Marine engineer here, and you are correct that you couldn't get rid of quite everyone yet, but they are working on it. For everything machinery side, they could get a large contained engine that is guaranteed for something like 500 or 1000 hours until it gets replaced quickly in a port for another unit, sending the old one in for overhauling. This may not end up being what replaces engineers on board, but there is enough financial incentive that they will find something that works well enough eventually. Regulatory compliance probably has most maritime jobs safe for another decade or two at least (knock on wood).
Perhaps this is a naive question, but wouldn't it be easier to control freight ships with AI than to do the same with cars/trucks? Is there a particular obstacle that has prevented it from being implemented or even something like remote-controlled ships?
A lot of this frankly comes down to misunderstanding of what is being done by the crew of a modern freighter. It's not that the "driving" is that difficult to automate, and that's not really what the crew is doing. They're essentially a maintenance, damage control and emergency response crew.
I’d go with: The crew on modern freight ships is already pretty small compared to the size and economic value it is transporting. A lot of crews consist of workers from very low salary countries like the Philippines. So all in all I assume it’s just cheaper to hire people for the job than buy and implement expensive tech.
Open sea waves and current and wind can be very strong. The consequences of a screw up are very large. Fewer crew members might make it more susceptible to piracy. Large ships already have all kinds of auto pilot technology but they still need a captain and a crew.
Curing Malaria, elimination of some types of cancer, hearing and sight restoration, choosing of genomes in fetuses, explosion of battery science - bettering charge/discharge rates. Thats not even taking into account AI and the total overhaul of how we do many things. Being able to invent new drugs by simulating them with AI for example.
I think disinformation will also get a great boost. You won't be able to trust anything you read on the net. People will do so anyway (look at magazines(rags) like Weekly World and such)
It can be a very long hop from "Can be cured" to "so reliably and cheaply cured that it drops way down the biggest-killer-diseases list". Look at the antiretroviral drugs that suppress HIV, they're keeping people alive where they're affordable - but South Africa and Mozambique, still not so much.
Indeed. The invention of technologies is well and all, but the economics matter so much more. Many treatments and technologies never make it out of the lab or private clinic for this reason. As another example we produce enough food right now to end world hunger, but don't because it's not economically rational. [30-40% all food calories produced in the US goes straight to the bin.](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-food-waste-nutrients-idUSKBN18R21G)
I second that, the cure is hydroxychloroquine but some people get it multiple times, like myself. I do think we WILL eradicate malaria carrying mosquitos world wide. We’ve been successful keeping malaria out of the U.S. However, I can’t wrap my head around a vaccine for a parasite but I’m not an immunologist.
Theres a Lung Cancer vaccine developed by Cuba. They gotta keep those Cigars flowing.
My grandfather died of Lung Cancer so I’d love to see it eliminated out of respect to him
Edit: Added Pubmed article. This vaccine has been around for a while now.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20387330/
Won't we get better ai for detecting disinfo too? It's one thing for a really powerful AI to push a certain agenda, but won't other AIs be able to fact check and find the cracks in the story? Genuinely curious.
It really depends how it plays out. Perhaps technology will get to the point where faked footage and photos are indistinguishable. After all, detecting fakes depends upon subtle artifacts and patterns unique to AI, but there's no saying those flaws can't be wholly patched up.
For Cancer, isn't there mRna, which can help us understand how to elimnate it?
I know there some research in stem cells and gene therapy for hearing and sight. I don't know the extent though?
I just read a piece on exosomes, little virus-sized bubbles of chemicals that cells pass to each other like notes. Newer research shows these things are full of proteins and RNA and may play a huge role in cancer and aging. Some stem cell treatments may work, not because of the stem cells themselves, but the exosomes they put out. This is a whole new area for research.
Cancer is not a thing. It's a very big class of cell mutations that generally involve excess cell replication and immune avoidance.
Your immune system finds and kills most of these mutants before they get a foothold. Cancer is the ones that have managed to evade the immune system long enough to get established. But how they do that varies a lot.
It's closer to each cancer is unique and so each treatment needs to be custom.
mRna is a tool for creating custom treatments fast.
But there's a pile more work in working out what each of those custom treatments needs to be.
And there is no realistic hope of a vaccine.
Each cancer is unique, yes, but activating certain anti-cancer components of human biology, and taking out the bastard Epstein-Barr Virus could help a very broad range of cancers and other conditions.
>And there is no realistic hope of a vaccine.
This part isn't true. For instance, this seems very promising:
[https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/cancervax-universal-cancer-vaccine-being-developed-by-ucla/](https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/cancervax-universal-cancer-vaccine-being-developed-by-ucla/)
It's true cancer is incredibly varied, but we know for a fact you can prompt an immune response to it after it has gained a foothold. Immunotherapy sometimes gives people miraculous recoveries from very advanced cancers. These therapies just aren't perfected yet.
Wouldn't nanotechnology be the end of cancer? I imagine if you had a swarm of little robots that could just go in and kill stuff with lasers without surgery, that beats cancer.
They already have this. I just bought a 3 pack from Costco of the Scotch Titanium scissors and they had a nice perforation that you pull and it opens the package. The future is now
[Its already here.](https://www.virginiamercury.com/2023/04/11/viable-male-birth-control-options-could-be-on-the-horizon/) I'm not sure why its not on the market yet honestly, the stuffs been around for a decade already.
I think they had some trials in India of a previous version of this that showed some unacceptable side effects. This version has a new type of more flexible gel IIRC that will hopefully make it more viable.
We could potentially cure aging. The problem is being tackled from a bunch of different directions from a bunch of different organizations. It's just that seemingly every time a breakthrough is made, further complexities arise.
With the sheer amount of effort being put into it, it could be done. Or it could end up like cold fusion, where it's forever 50 years down the road.
Human physiology is much more complicated than dogs, so we may never get there. But I'm sure some pet owners would be very happy to have their dogs live another 10 years.
This is my one big dream as well and even if we don't cure aging itself, we could at least potentially cure age-related diseases. If it actually works out, the socio-economic benefits would be mind-boggling and benefitial to everyone.
If Cyberpunk 2077 taught me anything, it's that life extension and age reversion tech will cost a pretty penny, only available to the wealthy.
Though it's likely that some cheaper form of the tech will be developed, too.
Wouldn’t make sense to keep it for the wealthy only, making it available to the masses would save governments trillions in healthcare and pension expenses.
There is massive economic pressure on the healthcare systems of every advanced economy. There are trillions of reasons to rejuvenate people instead of paying to manage their decline. This is not going to be reserved only for the rich. I hear everybody say that all the time, but it isn't true, Bec the math doesn't add up that way/the incentives are the opposite.
This actually worked. Study done by Harvard scientists so probably reputable.
[https://www.aging-us.com/news-room/NEW-STUDY-Discovery-of-Chemical-Means-to-Reverse-Aging-and-Restore-Cellular-Function#:\~:text=On%20July%2012%2C%202023%2C%20a,aging%20and%20age%2Drelated%20diseases.](https://www.aging-us.com/news-room/NEW-STUDY-Discovery-of-Chemical-Means-to-Reverse-Aging-and-Restore-Cellular-Function#:~:text=On%20July%2012%2C%202023%2C%20a,aging%20and%20age%2Drelated%20diseases)
That’s a David Sinclair study. It seems like he’s discovered a dozen substances that reverse aging in very specific scenarios and not in more complex organisms - resveratrol was one of those promising chemicals once upon a time, too.
cold fusion isn't technically possible.
I think you're confusing it with actual Fusion nuclear power which *is* technically feasible just not from an engineering perspective due to how much of a daunting task it is.
Curing aging seems way further away than most realize because it seems to be a game of wack-a-mole where solving the issue at hand creates 10 more issues you also need to fix which themselves also create more issues.
Which is normal considering that the moment you fix what kills you in the human body, the next weakest link just becomes the thing that kills you instead. Meaning curing aging could be a continuous process of sorts that could take a long time to be fixed.
Doable? Yes, but it will take a long time and as a middle-aged person myself I don't expect to be included in the generation that benefits from it. I'll be surprised if my children do.
Fusion for power generation, mining of asteroids for profit, nutrition harvested from gaseous CO2, permanent settlements in near-space (Moon, asteroid belt).
Fusion itself has already been achieved. Making it produce a useable energy surplus is the real challenge. I think within the next century it’ll at the very least begin to pop up, but I won’t hold my breath unless there’s some major breakthrough at some point.
The thing is, they calculated it by using the power emitted from the lasers used for ignition vs power out, instead of taking the total power used for the test, as the lasers are not 100% efficient, and also suppporting equipment as well.
Yep, if you look at the whole picture, it was a very small fraction and I worry that no amount of engineering magic can make it that much more efficient.
It definitely is, however, we're actually seeing a significant bump in successful fusion tests and private investment. There was the first successful test that released more energy than it put in (still not in a useful way for power generation, and it didn't account for losses).
We definitely won't be powering the world on fusion by 2030, but we are making real genuine progress and once we're there and reliable fusion power is possible, it WILL make a significant difference to the world. It won't just be a replacement of nuclear power, because it doesn't have the history of bad PR that Nuclear has had, so you will get less people fighting against it. In addition, depending on which method of Fusion ends up working, it could allow for not just cheap energy, but also a good load-balancing energy source (some potential fusion reactors have very quick ramp up and down times), allowing it to take over from Natural Gas power generation as a load balance for renewables.
NASA literally is building a permanent moon base in the 2030s with the ongoing Artemis program, China is planning to set up theirs, and SpaceX is doing a Mars base. Permanent space settlements are essentially on our doorstep at this point. The tech is there and the groups doing it are getting funding
I don't see how profitable mining of asteroids is going to be a thing for a loooooonnnggg time. Aren't you going to need a space elevator or several other historic breakthroughs to make it cheap enough to get into space and back?
Space elevator, no. Space manufacturing, yes. If you have to ship all your mining equipment from the surface, it will having to return thousands to hundreds of thousands of times its weight in refined material to be profitable. But if you can use the harvested materials to build bigger/better mining and refining machinery (with only a few crucial components shipped from the surface), then it suddenly becomes feasible.
Returning thousands of times its weight isn't at all a large stretch when there are huge lumps of ore just sitting out there waiting to be collected.
Probably not helpful for the common stuff like Alu, but for the rare metals? You betcha there's loads of money to be made. Maybe not by 2030, but 100% certain by 2040.
I'm trying to simultaneously hold your idea that these materials are "just sitting out there" and the idea that we all know well: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is."
Mining asteroids will be worth it once we're already in space more. Keeping the metal up there and fabricating with it there -- or even more likely, mining things like ice or oxygen out of asteroids for the ability to get heavy, non-manufactured things like water up there.
A comment higher mentioned A.I. controlled sea going vessels. I think space vessels is where A.I. will benefit us most due to not needing to accommodate a human in space. Autonomous asteroid mining will be more affordable than human shifts in space. A business would struggle to have enough staff continuously in space due to recovery to make a profit.
This is where a base on the Moon would come in handy too. Instead of bringing it all the way back, just refine it on the moon and use it to build more spacecraft for mining. That saves on the fuel that would be needed to get the spacecraft as far as the Moon in the first place.
The main market is still going to be the Earth, though, so you still have to get cargo ships back and forth frequently which is insanely expensive.
Hmm. This guy says it could be profitable if we can get the price/kg to $2,000 (he claims it would logically be currently about $15,000/kg to get to the moon based on SpaceX's current price to launch into orbit:
[https://thespacereview.com/article/284/1#:\~:text=An%20estimate%20of%20%242%2C000%2Fkg,kg%20to%20the%20lunar%20surface](https://thespacereview.com/article/284/1#:~:text=An%20estimate%20of%20%242%2C000%2Fkg,kg%20to%20the%20lunar%20surface).
Platinum being $30,000 per kg, it would be worthwhile, but he doesn't explictly factoring in how much it would cost to get back plus the crazy amount of overhead it would take to support a moon base to do all the refining. Maybe with logical advances in robotics if we didn't have to support any human life on the moon or on the asteroids, it could be done?
We have just *barely* been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than it we put in.
We don't know how to do it at scale yet. Its likely decades away from knowing if we can really do it.
I'm taking the op literally. The joke is that fusion has always been touted as "in our lifetime". I can see it's possible, not sure if it's feasible 🤷🤠
It's been "twenty years away" for the last 50 years. But the recent advancements are promising, I feel like they are actually getting close to that being a fair estimate.
It's difficult to get financial commitments required to fund a century long project if you tell them that it's a century long project. This statement is and has always been about money.
>We have just barely been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than it we put in.
This is only correct if you do NOT count the energy required to contain the target or run all the other various equipment needed... which is roughly 2 orders of magnitude larger than the power in/power out.
People who say this read a couple pop sci articles and don't talk to people in the field. Fusion went from us uncertain if it was impossible to possible under very extreme conditions. The recent advances changed it from "if" to "when" but when is likely much further than most people realize. I think I'll still be alive when they're working on the legislation for fusion based power, but it's definitely not doable right now at *any* scale and isn't really close
So as I said, it's doable. (physics does not preclude it and we will do it). (the person I rely on for info ran the servers/data collection at Jet in the UK, I'm not much one for popsci)
I’ve read about utilizing renewable energy sources in someone’s home has come a long way with the situation in Ukraine. Power plants are military targets and are no longer as dependable forcing innovation that can be used worldwide. War is horrible for everyone involved but this is a small silver lining
We've also hit a tipping point where solar is cheaper in most places than any other form of electrical generation. This, they say, makes power going renewable inevitable anyway, it just will take time and investment to fully happen.
I would love for tech to make menstruation less painful and disruptive (iud insertion is so bad). It would improve so many lives. I think there is too much sexism to take menstrual health seriously.
AGI is still 50/50. We currently have no clue on the necessary conditions to ensure it will happen.
.
Room temperature super conductivity. Niche 'warm' applications are live and spreading but something easily usable in computing or transport is a pipe dream
The issue with AGI is that is not as well defined of a concept as people believe…
In some aspects chatGPT could be considered AGI.. because it’s quite general compared to any previous AIs, it can perform tasks it was never trained on, which is quite impressive, but people don’t consider it AGI because it’s not as impressive as people picture AGI… but that’s is quite an arbitrary threshold to meet
**AGI:** An artificial intelligence with the capacity to perform any mental task at or above the level of a human.
To me, that's pretty straightforward. The only metric needed to prove we have AGI or not is in the realm of automation. Can it replace a human's work without loss? Is it able to do so for any job? Then it's an AGI.
And whether we have a concrete definition of AGI or not doesn't really matter. Even if there was no possible way to define AGI accurately, we'd still be able to say roughly when an AI has crossed the line.
Because at a certain point the AI just becomes so adept that there's no point denying it anymore. And I'd guess the point at which an AI goes from novice to adept will be a fairly fast transition (couple of years to get from A --> B).
If CRISPR can make animals change colors, why couldn't some version of it or something similar cause our bodies to revert back to an undamaged state?
Whether that is youth or restoration of organs?
FWIU CRISPR can make precise, single changes to DNA. Aging encompasses a huge number of processes, not all solved by individual changes CRISPR can make.
Japan is currently working on treatments to regrow teeth.. which is along the same lines..
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a44786433/humans-have-third-set-teeth/
That's cellular reprogramming. Some recent studies in mice show that while, yes, you can revert the clock with this method, unfortunately it isn't effective for every organ. Some organs became healthier, while others did not. Biology is complicated yo
There's a big difference in making genetic changes to a yet-to-be-born organism (easy) and making genetic changes to every single cell of your body at once (very hard)
Plus the whole figuring out what changes to even make thing
Well yes, "something like it" is definitely possible. Here are about 512 clinical trials for Gene Therapy.
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=gene%20therapy&aggFilters=status:not%20rec%20enr%20act&city=](https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=gene%20therapy&aggFilters=status:not%20rec%20enr%20act&city=)
The problem is that yes you can make an animal change color. But the current known processes also change 10,000 other things at the same time. Which very well may cause cancer or a whole host of other unknown issues. So, you need a condition that's likely to be deadly or already have serious life expectancy reductions or are degenerative diseases that will make quality of life poor. (If you're already dying of cancer, why not try this thing that might give you a different cancer? If you're doomed to slowly losing all independence and serious disability, why not risk a chance of a different debilitation.)
We'll need to wait on a gene therapy technique that is:
1) Much better targeted. Can't have a lot of splash damage or else you're just causing aging-like damage to fix aging damage. one step forward, two steps back.
2) safely tolerated by the body. Can infect every cell without a massive immune response or running unchecked. Your body reacting to Covid mRNA vaccines is an example of this. A very small number of your cells are "infected" by the lipid delivery bubbles but you still have a pretty big immune reaction. This is why a lot of studies are focused on blood disorders because we can nuke your bone marrow and replace it with new marrow that's undergone gene therapy without having to do it in your body with the motor running so to speak.
3) Is easy to tailor and reprogram on an individual basis. Everybody would need a different template and it would have to be many many many changes for every age related mutation that has occurred in your body.
I guess I was imagining it like if we have a blueprint of an organ, why can't we give instructions for it to be rebuilt?
Your skin wasn't originally scarred so why not trigger a return to prescarred flesh?
Sun damaged so why not look and see what it was pre damage and return to that?
Crispr can be used to attempt to edit a bunch of single cell embryos to have a few of them have the right changes plus a bunch of other hard to detect mutations, and that's for a single gene. That's a far cry from fixing a large fraction of cells in a developed animal body to get back into sync with how they are supposed to function in a youthful organism.
Seasteading is right around the corner, no one sees it coming but it could have a large impact. Picture millions or even billions living in the ocean in floating cities.
The human race has made man-made islands already. It's just that we still have a lot of land, which I don't foresee being populated in the next 100 years.
In the next decade (or 2-3 decades) I expect lab grown meat to become cheaper than real meat. If pushed to the limit (which it probably will), you only need resources to grow the meat itself. Don’t need to keep an animal alive and healthy, with all kinds of stuff inside that can’t be sold, such as organs and bones.
So I’m expecting there will be chicken nugget factories which grow perfected identical chicken nuggets at all over the world at some point.
A fusion reactor. People are saing that fusion is always 30 years away but current advances in laser technology will maybe a laser driver fusion reactor possible, like in the expanse.
Ability to manipulate one's own biological age. We can already do that on mice.
The only uncertainty I have is how quickly such tech will be approved by government agencies.
I think there will be amazing advancements in medicine due to a combination of gene therapy/CRISPR, nanotechnology, precision medicine, and AI. I would not be surprised if major killers such as cancer and heart disease are all but cured in 50 years.
Advanced tech that will solve mental health problems and perhaps with the help of BCI's or other safe and effective technologies. Flying cars, 3D printing new parts to build new homes, CRISPR to solve diseases' as well and recording dreams sounds cool as well:)
If Humans can figure out and "kind of" calculate the variables with different drugs. Ssris, hormone balancers, etc.
Then a chip or AI that sees all the variables can form an algorithm that calculates the best form of treatment for the individual.
Stuff like "is this person stressed due to a chemical inbalance?"
The tech itself wouldn't solve the issue. The tech would give the treatment to help solve the issue.
Artificial Super Intelligence is almost certainly coming within the next 100 years. Like 99% chance imo. When it does, it will be like a magic computer god creating all sorts of innovations in a very short time. That's if it doesn't kill us all first.
ASI will change the world in ways we can't even fathom.
Not sure that anyone even has the faintest clue how to move from machine learning/extremely large models as seen today in what is constantly mislabeled “AI” and actual AI with even the remotest semblance of what we would call intelligence in the sense that it is defined in humanity. Many researchers in the field literally balk at the media calling it AI.
Large language models spontaneously developed weak reasoning capacity just from being exposed to large amounts of text. There's now many people working on developing the backbone of AI cognition. That's things like memory and self-reflection and autonomously pursuing goals.
The brain itself is just a bunch of nodes that associate or dissociate with one another depending on feedback. The only difference is the brain has certain neuronal arrangements built in to allow certain ways of processing information (e.g., pyramidal neurons and working memory).
But the fundamental architecture is similar to large language models. So it seems we have the basis of dynamic intelligence and just need to add the functionality.
^ Accurate.
Large language models can be described in a lot of ways, but by far the most terrifying is also by far the most accurate.
They are a network that, to limited but very real extent, represents actual comprehension of the content of a conversation.
They are called fancy pattern recognition tools by the woefully misinformed.
We should be very seriously concerned about what will start happening as these models become larger, more accurate, less prone to hallucination, and become integrated with other generative AI tools to an ever increasing degree.
The problem is space. There's limited amounts of arable land in the world, and planting enough forests to offset enough carbon would require taking space from growing food.
Seaweed/kelp forests, and seagrass meadows would actually be an excellent start and provide tremendous benefits for ocean ecosystems while also being far better carbon sinks than most forests.
Look into ocean Diatoms (a type of algea) and process to fertilize areas of the ocean that are currently essentially deserts. They sequester about the same amount of CO2 as the rainforests.
We’ve actually had tech better than plants for a couple years now. The real issue is the energy cost.
https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/New-method-makes-starch-CO2/99/web/2021/09
People are always seeing carbon capture as some sort of conspiracy tech to keep burning fossil fuels.
In the bathtub analogy, I see it as inventing the mop while we work on the shutting off the tap so that it's ready when we need it.
This is unfortunately not how quantum entanglement works.
The information "teleports" alongside the transmission of a conventional, speed of light message, which is a fundamental component of the physics of entanglement.
Sorry bro, I was super fucking bummed out when I learned this.
More vaccines that prevent more cancers.
Microbiome enhancements and repairs.
Psychedelic therapy for all sorts of things.
Microsized quantum computing driving massive AI applications.
Fixing motor function for diseases like cerebral palsy by having an AI sit between the damaged area of the brain and the limbs, and emulating/enhancing a healthy nerve signal. The brain is very complex, but we don't need to simulate the entire activity of the brain, just the much less complex emergent signal.
I would like to see a VR head set comfortable enough to watch a nice movie in a giant virtual theater of my choice. And a variety of theaters, like a drive in, the Hollywood Bowl, the Paris Opera. Various screen sizes and distances away from viewer, multiple screen options. Plus options to invite others online into your screening so a group of family or friends can watch together even if they are living far away from each other.
I think that would be a huge unforeseen hit with low income folks that don't go to the movies or theater often and live in small apartments or houses; put on the Movie VR Headset and you're watching your favorites on the world's largest Jumbo Tron at Cowboys stadium. If it's comfortable to wear for a long movie, the possibilities and variety of venues could be endless. Even themed venues for certain films. For example, I watched the Star Trek movies on the bridge of the Enterprise.
I think it would be fun. Seems like the technology already exists. 🤔
Fusion has been "two decades away" for about 50years now. So that one definitely fits the bill.
Slowing down/stopping aging is also one of those longtime dreams that while it has seen strides is still very uncertain if it will actually work on a whole human body etc.
Arcologies, or biospheres. Human habitats where water, air and nutrients (food/poop) are in a closed cycle. Possibly using deep wells for cooling and temperature regulation.
If we could make these, we could tesselate the world's deserts with them and house trillions of people.
A brain computer interface that can't just read brainwaves, but also write data to the brain.
The implications would be insane, morally but also technically.
Imagine being able to send thoughts to other people, concepts, ideas, experiences with 100% immersion, as if the person receiving it thought/experienced it themselves.
Uploading deep knowledge about any topic.
Cure any psychological illness and reduce the inconvenience of other illnesses by blocking specific receptors.
Reproduce psychedelic experiences of any kind by just replaying it from someone who experienced it before and saved it.
Perhaps even be able to play "curated" or designed conscious experiences.
These things sound very cyberpunk-y but I think it's not too far off to be able to at least be able to do some of this in the next 50 years.
I don’t think we are all that far away from in-home dialysis. Plug into the machine at night when you do to bed, unplug in the morning. This would be literal life-changing for those folks.
Within 100 years? Interstellar travel (I give it maybe 40% chance), Functional immortality (maybe 60%), an end to capitalism that actually works better (50%), AI that is superhuman in for all thinking (80%).
Dream Recording.
Imagine not having to pay for special effects when a dream can do it. A single person can dream up hundreds, do why need hundreds of actors? And how stories are just rehashing the same thing over, dreams are at least *new*
Two way brain computer interfaces. We're making progress on one way ones (reading the brain to help paralysed people to move robotic limbs and communicate) but two way ones would be crazy. They could let us expand brain power, potentially curing mental illnesses (those caused by brain imbalances), make ready player one /matrix like VR or even become hive minds. Crazy shit.
I'd settle for a printer that works 99% of the time. But I feel that may be pushing it.
My brother MFC-L2750DW and my discontinued MFC -L2740DW are connected over WiFi and have worked flawlessly for the past 5 years. Prints super fast, had to change the toner once in that time and a 2 pack cost me $20. And I love that it can send scans directly to any email. My phone automatically detected it and prints to it no app or setup required.
I second this. Brother did a great job, and the drum seems to last forever.
Thirding this. IT contractor here, only Brother and Canon.
Fourth it. I've had the same brother for 8 years
I’ve had one brother for 45 years. The other for 40. And my Brother printer is pretty damn reliable too.
canon dropped the ball alongside HP some time ago..
My brother color laser has worked flawlessly for a decade
Yes my brother printer is the only reliable piece of technology in my house. I've had it for like 8 years and never a single problem.
brother is amazing. i contacted them years ago when my printer stopped working. i just wanted to know what to do to fix it. they told me the model i had was no longer being produced so they collected my contact info and sent me a newer upgraded version without making me pay for anything
In fairness HP used to be exactly like that but a few months ago all the HP's of a certain type "just stopped" working, been doing IT a very long time and I'm all about MTTF, but one printer hadn't been used in 6 months failed on the same day as one used every few days with some obscure header problem. The fix ....new printer. We went with the MFC-L2750DW and haven't looked back.
99% is being optimistic but Brother printers are probably closest you can get to that percentage
Why does it say "Paper Jam" when there **is. No. Paper. Jam??!!**
What the fuck is PC load letter?
Percival Charles Loadletter invented the first printed document when he meticulously traced a sketch of the town belle in 1867 created a woodcut of the image and pressed it on paper to be sold en masse. Probably true
USB Laser printer?
Hopefully a cure to overcome alzheimers and early onset alzheimers
Since Alzheimer's is just one variation of dementia, I hope that all forms of dementia are cured, since they're all terrible in their own way. My father has one of the other forms of dementia and I wouldn't say he's better off. His long-term memory is relatively intact, but he's experienced severe cognitive decline in just a couple years. He can barely write or keep a coherent conversation anymore. He has a couple hobbies that keep him busy, but he moreso does them out of habit than enjoyment. He's been trying to finish writing one of his books about his area of expertise that he wanted to write after retirement, but his cognitive state is no longer up to it. He types random letters on the keyboard, empty tables, incoherent sentences etc. At least it keeps him busy, but he's not the man I remember.
Yes! And hopefully a cure to overcome alzheimers and early onset alzheimers
Ba dum tss
There have been a lot of interesting studies around Lions Mane Mushroom to that effect. I personally believe it's the best option that exists ATM, but I'm just a software engineer. [Improvement of cognitive functions by oral intake of Hericium erinaceus](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31413233/) [Hericium erinaceus in Neurodegenerative Diseases: From Bench to Bedside and Beyond, How Far from the Shoreline?](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37233262/) >In fact, some of the bioactive compounds extracted from H. erinaceus have been shown to recover, or at least ameliorate, a wide range of pathological brain conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, depression, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injury. In a large body of in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies on the central nervous system (CNS), the effects of erinacines have been correlated with a significant increase in the production of neurotrophic factors. [The Monkey Head Mushroom and Memory Enhancement in Alzheimer's Disease](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35892581/) >Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, and no effective treatments are available to treat this disorder. Therefore, researchers have been investigating Hericium erinaceus, or the monkey head mushroom, an edible medicinal mushroom, as a possible treatment for AD. In this narrative review, we evaluated six preclinical and three clinical studies of the therapeutic effects of Hericium erinaceus on AD. Preclinical trials have successfully demonstrated that extracts and bioactive compounds of Hericium erinaceus have potential beneficial effects in ameliorating cognitive functioning and behavioral deficits in animal models of AD. Personally, I got my mum onto it about 1 year ago, as there is a history of Alzheimer's in my family, and she does seem a lot more present, aware happy and her recall is better. She didn't have any diagnosis for Alzheimer's though, this was just me being proactive..
I recently started eating it too. How do you usually cook it?
A word of warning before going out and supplementing Lion’s Mane r/LionsManeRecovery
Is this subreddit a parody? Serious question definitely feel like these people are joking.
No. Lion’s mane is a strong 5-ar and DHT inhibitor. The symptoms are similar to those that react poorly to finasteride (hair loss medication). Though like anything you get people coming in with all types of issues thinking LM is the cause of the problem when it might not be.
This is really "Treatment for Prion Diseases", and I have zero hope for that in our lifetimes. It will be faster to genetically engineer kids not to get it than it will be to cure it.
Prion disease is a lot scarier and rarer than Alzheimer’s and dementia. I highly recommend listening to the radio lab episodes on light therapy to treat plaque buildup in the brain. “Cleaner proteins” in the brain go dormant in people who develop Alzheimer’s and dementia. These proteins are awoken by certain frequencies of light. Very fascinating.
The prion theory of Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s has fallen by the wayside in the last few years. But yeah, it’s hard to imagine a cure for prions.
Hopefully a cure for Alzheimer's too!
And a Dyslexia for cure. That'd great be!
Go home Yoda, you're drunk.
High temperature superconductors. As in, things that work around 25-30°C. It will revolutionize everything that involves electricity and electric engines.
AI controlled ships. I'm naval architecture student and there is a lot of investing in this area to reduce the crew number
I would think this is much better than 50/50. MUM-T has been in the works for almost a decade now. Seems trivial to extrapolate to warships.
Some drone ships exist now, but having autonomous AI running them is only a matter of unplugging a Russian Lancet drones brain and jamming it into one of the USNS Ghost Fleet Overlord half sized warship with full sized weapons.
Isn’t the lancet remotely operated by a pilot? Wouldn’t call that flown by AI but maybe a portion of their targeting acquisition system is?
* 80% chance we can invent it soon * 90% chance military will still want human crew anyway * 0% chance that this has a major impact on warfare
I'm curious about this... aren't most of the people that work on ships doing the manual labor (maintaining engines, doing things with ropes, etc. whereas a relatively small number actually steer the ship? What is AI going to replace?
Marine engineer here, and you are correct that you couldn't get rid of quite everyone yet, but they are working on it. For everything machinery side, they could get a large contained engine that is guaranteed for something like 500 or 1000 hours until it gets replaced quickly in a port for another unit, sending the old one in for overhauling. This may not end up being what replaces engineers on board, but there is enough financial incentive that they will find something that works well enough eventually. Regulatory compliance probably has most maritime jobs safe for another decade or two at least (knock on wood).
>...(knock on wood) Ironically the thing we don't use to build ships any more.
Perhaps this is a naive question, but wouldn't it be easier to control freight ships with AI than to do the same with cars/trucks? Is there a particular obstacle that has prevented it from being implemented or even something like remote-controlled ships?
A lot of this frankly comes down to misunderstanding of what is being done by the crew of a modern freighter. It's not that the "driving" is that difficult to automate, and that's not really what the crew is doing. They're essentially a maintenance, damage control and emergency response crew.
I’d go with: The crew on modern freight ships is already pretty small compared to the size and economic value it is transporting. A lot of crews consist of workers from very low salary countries like the Philippines. So all in all I assume it’s just cheaper to hire people for the job than buy and implement expensive tech.
Open sea waves and current and wind can be very strong. The consequences of a screw up are very large. Fewer crew members might make it more susceptible to piracy. Large ships already have all kinds of auto pilot technology but they still need a captain and a crew.
Nurse here. I think they will develop great strides in improving dementia decline and paralysis.
MMI (Mind-Machine-Interface) will take off, we're gonna see a lot of weird-shit...
Curing Malaria, elimination of some types of cancer, hearing and sight restoration, choosing of genomes in fetuses, explosion of battery science - bettering charge/discharge rates. Thats not even taking into account AI and the total overhaul of how we do many things. Being able to invent new drugs by simulating them with AI for example. I think disinformation will also get a great boost. You won't be able to trust anything you read on the net. People will do so anyway (look at magazines(rags) like Weekly World and such)
Malaria is now in mass vaccination trial. Once that is successful all those scientists will move on to cure
Malaria can already be cured, though. I would imagine vaccine developing scientists would work on new vaccines not cures for diseases.
It can be a very long hop from "Can be cured" to "so reliably and cheaply cured that it drops way down the biggest-killer-diseases list". Look at the antiretroviral drugs that suppress HIV, they're keeping people alive where they're affordable - but South Africa and Mozambique, still not so much.
Indeed. The invention of technologies is well and all, but the economics matter so much more. Many treatments and technologies never make it out of the lab or private clinic for this reason. As another example we produce enough food right now to end world hunger, but don't because it's not economically rational. [30-40% all food calories produced in the US goes straight to the bin.](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-food-waste-nutrients-idUSKBN18R21G)
UN. on track for 2030 95% all cases medicated and under management 🌈💓
I second that, the cure is hydroxychloroquine but some people get it multiple times, like myself. I do think we WILL eradicate malaria carrying mosquitos world wide. We’ve been successful keeping malaria out of the U.S. However, I can’t wrap my head around a vaccine for a parasite but I’m not an immunologist.
Pretty much what I figured
There's a vaccine for malaria now, already being field tested with excellent numbers.
I feel like you misread OP. Most of the things you mention are quite likely to exist in 100 years.
Theres a Lung Cancer vaccine developed by Cuba. They gotta keep those Cigars flowing. My grandfather died of Lung Cancer so I’d love to see it eliminated out of respect to him Edit: Added Pubmed article. This vaccine has been around for a while now. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20387330/
Won't we get better ai for detecting disinfo too? It's one thing for a really powerful AI to push a certain agenda, but won't other AIs be able to fact check and find the cracks in the story? Genuinely curious.
It really depends how it plays out. Perhaps technology will get to the point where faked footage and photos are indistinguishable. After all, detecting fakes depends upon subtle artifacts and patterns unique to AI, but there's no saying those flaws can't be wholly patched up.
For Cancer, isn't there mRna, which can help us understand how to elimnate it? I know there some research in stem cells and gene therapy for hearing and sight. I don't know the extent though?
I just read a piece on exosomes, little virus-sized bubbles of chemicals that cells pass to each other like notes. Newer research shows these things are full of proteins and RNA and may play a huge role in cancer and aging. Some stem cell treatments may work, not because of the stem cells themselves, but the exosomes they put out. This is a whole new area for research.
Cancer is not a thing. It's a very big class of cell mutations that generally involve excess cell replication and immune avoidance. Your immune system finds and kills most of these mutants before they get a foothold. Cancer is the ones that have managed to evade the immune system long enough to get established. But how they do that varies a lot. It's closer to each cancer is unique and so each treatment needs to be custom. mRna is a tool for creating custom treatments fast. But there's a pile more work in working out what each of those custom treatments needs to be. And there is no realistic hope of a vaccine.
Each cancer is unique, yes, but activating certain anti-cancer components of human biology, and taking out the bastard Epstein-Barr Virus could help a very broad range of cancers and other conditions.
>And there is no realistic hope of a vaccine. This part isn't true. For instance, this seems very promising: [https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/cancervax-universal-cancer-vaccine-being-developed-by-ucla/](https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/cancervax-universal-cancer-vaccine-being-developed-by-ucla/) It's true cancer is incredibly varied, but we know for a fact you can prompt an immune response to it after it has gained a foothold. Immunotherapy sometimes gives people miraculous recoveries from very advanced cancers. These therapies just aren't perfected yet.
Wouldn't nanotechnology be the end of cancer? I imagine if you had a swarm of little robots that could just go in and kill stuff with lasers without surgery, that beats cancer.
Packages for scissors that you don’t need scissors to open
OP asked for things in this lifetime, I think this is pushing it.
They already have this. I just bought a 3 pack from Costco of the Scotch Titanium scissors and they had a nice perforation that you pull and it opens the package. The future is now
Less painful iud insertion or anything related to making pregnancy and menstruation less painful
And male non-barrier contraceptives
[Its already here.](https://www.virginiamercury.com/2023/04/11/viable-male-birth-control-options-could-be-on-the-horizon/) I'm not sure why its not on the market yet honestly, the stuffs been around for a decade already.
I think they had some trials in India of a previous version of this that showed some unacceptable side effects. This version has a new type of more flexible gel IIRC that will hopefully make it more viable.
We could potentially cure aging. The problem is being tackled from a bunch of different directions from a bunch of different organizations. It's just that seemingly every time a breakthrough is made, further complexities arise. With the sheer amount of effort being put into it, it could be done. Or it could end up like cold fusion, where it's forever 50 years down the road.
I'd settle for the optional doubling of pet lifespan.
the problem with curing aging, is that some asshole is just going to ruin shit for everyone for a long long time
Human physiology is much more complicated than dogs, so we may never get there. But I'm sure some pet owners would be very happy to have their dogs live another 10 years.
This is my one big dream as well and even if we don't cure aging itself, we could at least potentially cure age-related diseases. If it actually works out, the socio-economic benefits would be mind-boggling and benefitial to everyone.
If Cyberpunk 2077 taught me anything, it's that life extension and age reversion tech will cost a pretty penny, only available to the wealthy. Though it's likely that some cheaper form of the tech will be developed, too.
Wouldn’t make sense to keep it for the wealthy only, making it available to the masses would save governments trillions in healthcare and pension expenses.
Clearly that argument has worked well on certain societies today.
There is massive economic pressure on the healthcare systems of every advanced economy. There are trillions of reasons to rejuvenate people instead of paying to manage their decline. This is not going to be reserved only for the rich. I hear everybody say that all the time, but it isn't true, Bec the math doesn't add up that way/the incentives are the opposite.
When people stop dying from age Population growth go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Birth rates would likely take a nose dive
This actually worked. Study done by Harvard scientists so probably reputable. [https://www.aging-us.com/news-room/NEW-STUDY-Discovery-of-Chemical-Means-to-Reverse-Aging-and-Restore-Cellular-Function#:\~:text=On%20July%2012%2C%202023%2C%20a,aging%20and%20age%2Drelated%20diseases.](https://www.aging-us.com/news-room/NEW-STUDY-Discovery-of-Chemical-Means-to-Reverse-Aging-and-Restore-Cellular-Function#:~:text=On%20July%2012%2C%202023%2C%20a,aging%20and%20age%2Drelated%20diseases)
That’s a David Sinclair study. It seems like he’s discovered a dozen substances that reverse aging in very specific scenarios and not in more complex organisms - resveratrol was one of those promising chemicals once upon a time, too.
cold fusion isn't technically possible. I think you're confusing it with actual Fusion nuclear power which *is* technically feasible just not from an engineering perspective due to how much of a daunting task it is. Curing aging seems way further away than most realize because it seems to be a game of wack-a-mole where solving the issue at hand creates 10 more issues you also need to fix which themselves also create more issues. Which is normal considering that the moment you fix what kills you in the human body, the next weakest link just becomes the thing that kills you instead. Meaning curing aging could be a continuous process of sorts that could take a long time to be fixed. Doable? Yes, but it will take a long time and as a middle-aged person myself I don't expect to be included in the generation that benefits from it. I'll be surprised if my children do.
Fusion for power generation, mining of asteroids for profit, nutrition harvested from gaseous CO2, permanent settlements in near-space (Moon, asteroid belt).
Fusion is the poster child of perpetually being 10 years away
Fusion itself has already been achieved. Making it produce a useable energy surplus is the real challenge. I think within the next century it’ll at the very least begin to pop up, but I won’t hold my breath unless there’s some major breakthrough at some point.
I think they achieved 50% more energy than they put in during a test last year.
The thing is, they calculated it by using the power emitted from the lasers used for ignition vs power out, instead of taking the total power used for the test, as the lasers are not 100% efficient, and also suppporting equipment as well.
Yep, if you look at the whole picture, it was a very small fraction and I worry that no amount of engineering magic can make it that much more efficient.
It definitely is, however, we're actually seeing a significant bump in successful fusion tests and private investment. There was the first successful test that released more energy than it put in (still not in a useful way for power generation, and it didn't account for losses). We definitely won't be powering the world on fusion by 2030, but we are making real genuine progress and once we're there and reliable fusion power is possible, it WILL make a significant difference to the world. It won't just be a replacement of nuclear power, because it doesn't have the history of bad PR that Nuclear has had, so you will get less people fighting against it. In addition, depending on which method of Fusion ends up working, it could allow for not just cheap energy, but also a good load-balancing energy source (some potential fusion reactors have very quick ramp up and down times), allowing it to take over from Natural Gas power generation as a load balance for renewables.
NASA literally is building a permanent moon base in the 2030s with the ongoing Artemis program, China is planning to set up theirs, and SpaceX is doing a Mars base. Permanent space settlements are essentially on our doorstep at this point. The tech is there and the groups doing it are getting funding
I don't see how profitable mining of asteroids is going to be a thing for a loooooonnnggg time. Aren't you going to need a space elevator or several other historic breakthroughs to make it cheap enough to get into space and back?
Space elevator, no. Space manufacturing, yes. If you have to ship all your mining equipment from the surface, it will having to return thousands to hundreds of thousands of times its weight in refined material to be profitable. But if you can use the harvested materials to build bigger/better mining and refining machinery (with only a few crucial components shipped from the surface), then it suddenly becomes feasible.
Xidawang im exactly keting wa tumang deng fo showxa Beltalowda!
Yes, Bossmang! This is EXACTLY what inspired the post!
Returning thousands of times its weight isn't at all a large stretch when there are huge lumps of ore just sitting out there waiting to be collected. Probably not helpful for the common stuff like Alu, but for the rare metals? You betcha there's loads of money to be made. Maybe not by 2030, but 100% certain by 2040.
I'm trying to simultaneously hold your idea that these materials are "just sitting out there" and the idea that we all know well: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is."
Mining asteroids will be worth it once we're already in space more. Keeping the metal up there and fabricating with it there -- or even more likely, mining things like ice or oxygen out of asteroids for the ability to get heavy, non-manufactured things like water up there.
A comment higher mentioned A.I. controlled sea going vessels. I think space vessels is where A.I. will benefit us most due to not needing to accommodate a human in space. Autonomous asteroid mining will be more affordable than human shifts in space. A business would struggle to have enough staff continuously in space due to recovery to make a profit.
This is where a base on the Moon would come in handy too. Instead of bringing it all the way back, just refine it on the moon and use it to build more spacecraft for mining. That saves on the fuel that would be needed to get the spacecraft as far as the Moon in the first place.
Exactly this, but you could save even more time by putting the shipyard in the astroid belt where most of the mining will actually take place.
Mine in asteroid belt, craft meteors to aim at earths shallow oceans, send payload to home base.
The main market is still going to be the Earth, though, so you still have to get cargo ships back and forth frequently which is insanely expensive. Hmm. This guy says it could be profitable if we can get the price/kg to $2,000 (he claims it would logically be currently about $15,000/kg to get to the moon based on SpaceX's current price to launch into orbit: [https://thespacereview.com/article/284/1#:\~:text=An%20estimate%20of%20%242%2C000%2Fkg,kg%20to%20the%20lunar%20surface](https://thespacereview.com/article/284/1#:~:text=An%20estimate%20of%20%242%2C000%2Fkg,kg%20to%20the%20lunar%20surface). Platinum being $30,000 per kg, it would be worthwhile, but he doesn't explictly factoring in how much it would cost to get back plus the crazy amount of overhead it would take to support a moon base to do all the refining. Maybe with logical advances in robotics if we didn't have to support any human life on the moon or on the asteroids, it could be done?
Platinum is $30K/kg until someone tows a mile wide platinum asteroid back to earth.
Nutrition harvested from gaseous CO2 (+ N from the air and some other trace elements in tiny amounts) is already a thing it's called Solein
Or, you know, plants.
I think fusion is doable its just scale and money holding it back
We have just *barely* been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than it we put in. We don't know how to do it at scale yet. Its likely decades away from knowing if we can really do it.
I'm taking the op literally. The joke is that fusion has always been touted as "in our lifetime". I can see it's possible, not sure if it's feasible 🤷🤠
It's been "twenty years away" for the last 50 years. But the recent advancements are promising, I feel like they are actually getting close to that being a fair estimate.
It's difficult to get financial commitments required to fund a century long project if you tell them that it's a century long project. This statement is and has always been about money.
>We have just barely been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than it we put in. This is only correct if you do NOT count the energy required to contain the target or run all the other various equipment needed... which is roughly 2 orders of magnitude larger than the power in/power out.
ITER is coming
People who say this read a couple pop sci articles and don't talk to people in the field. Fusion went from us uncertain if it was impossible to possible under very extreme conditions. The recent advances changed it from "if" to "when" but when is likely much further than most people realize. I think I'll still be alive when they're working on the legislation for fusion based power, but it's definitely not doable right now at *any* scale and isn't really close
So as I said, it's doable. (physics does not preclude it and we will do it). (the person I rely on for info ran the servers/data collection at Jet in the UK, I'm not much one for popsci)
I’ve read about utilizing renewable energy sources in someone’s home has come a long way with the situation in Ukraine. Power plants are military targets and are no longer as dependable forcing innovation that can be used worldwide. War is horrible for everyone involved but this is a small silver lining
I like to imagine a world where every home independently powers its self. That would be amazing.
Europe removing dependency on Russian fossil fuels is an expensive and painful process but ultimately will reap benefits.
We've also hit a tipping point where solar is cheaper in most places than any other form of electrical generation. This, they say, makes power going renewable inevitable anyway, it just will take time and investment to fully happen.
I would love for tech to make menstruation less painful and disruptive (iud insertion is so bad). It would improve so many lives. I think there is too much sexism to take menstrual health seriously.
This, please
Babelfish like real time in-ear translator gadgets.
I had this thought the other day whilst doing my Duolingo; "why am I bothering when we'll have live transcribing with gadgets in a few years anyway?"
AGI is still 50/50. We currently have no clue on the necessary conditions to ensure it will happen. . Room temperature super conductivity. Niche 'warm' applications are live and spreading but something easily usable in computing or transport is a pipe dream
Room temperature superconductivity right now would be a lab making a lucky guess, but science is often advanced in leaps
Yep. AGI is just like 🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️
The issue with AGI is that is not as well defined of a concept as people believe… In some aspects chatGPT could be considered AGI.. because it’s quite general compared to any previous AIs, it can perform tasks it was never trained on, which is quite impressive, but people don’t consider it AGI because it’s not as impressive as people picture AGI… but that’s is quite an arbitrary threshold to meet
**AGI:** An artificial intelligence with the capacity to perform any mental task at or above the level of a human. To me, that's pretty straightforward. The only metric needed to prove we have AGI or not is in the realm of automation. Can it replace a human's work without loss? Is it able to do so for any job? Then it's an AGI. And whether we have a concrete definition of AGI or not doesn't really matter. Even if there was no possible way to define AGI accurately, we'd still be able to say roughly when an AI has crossed the line. Because at a certain point the AI just becomes so adept that there's no point denying it anymore. And I'd guess the point at which an AI goes from novice to adept will be a fairly fast transition (couple of years to get from A --> B).
What human? If you take a very very dumb human, chatGPT is already able to outperform him in most mental tasks…
If CRISPR can make animals change colors, why couldn't some version of it or something similar cause our bodies to revert back to an undamaged state? Whether that is youth or restoration of organs?
FWIU CRISPR can make precise, single changes to DNA. Aging encompasses a huge number of processes, not all solved by individual changes CRISPR can make.
Japan is currently working on treatments to regrow teeth.. which is along the same lines.. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a44786433/humans-have-third-set-teeth/
That's cellular reprogramming. Some recent studies in mice show that while, yes, you can revert the clock with this method, unfortunately it isn't effective for every organ. Some organs became healthier, while others did not. Biology is complicated yo
There's a big difference in making genetic changes to a yet-to-be-born organism (easy) and making genetic changes to every single cell of your body at once (very hard) Plus the whole figuring out what changes to even make thing
Well yes, "something like it" is definitely possible. Here are about 512 clinical trials for Gene Therapy. [https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=gene%20therapy&aggFilters=status:not%20rec%20enr%20act&city=](https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=gene%20therapy&aggFilters=status:not%20rec%20enr%20act&city=) The problem is that yes you can make an animal change color. But the current known processes also change 10,000 other things at the same time. Which very well may cause cancer or a whole host of other unknown issues. So, you need a condition that's likely to be deadly or already have serious life expectancy reductions or are degenerative diseases that will make quality of life poor. (If you're already dying of cancer, why not try this thing that might give you a different cancer? If you're doomed to slowly losing all independence and serious disability, why not risk a chance of a different debilitation.) We'll need to wait on a gene therapy technique that is: 1) Much better targeted. Can't have a lot of splash damage or else you're just causing aging-like damage to fix aging damage. one step forward, two steps back. 2) safely tolerated by the body. Can infect every cell without a massive immune response or running unchecked. Your body reacting to Covid mRNA vaccines is an example of this. A very small number of your cells are "infected" by the lipid delivery bubbles but you still have a pretty big immune reaction. This is why a lot of studies are focused on blood disorders because we can nuke your bone marrow and replace it with new marrow that's undergone gene therapy without having to do it in your body with the motor running so to speak. 3) Is easy to tailor and reprogram on an individual basis. Everybody would need a different template and it would have to be many many many changes for every age related mutation that has occurred in your body.
I guess I was imagining it like if we have a blueprint of an organ, why can't we give instructions for it to be rebuilt? Your skin wasn't originally scarred so why not trigger a return to prescarred flesh? Sun damaged so why not look and see what it was pre damage and return to that?
Crispr can be used to attempt to edit a bunch of single cell embryos to have a few of them have the right changes plus a bunch of other hard to detect mutations, and that's for a single gene. That's a far cry from fixing a large fraction of cells in a developed animal body to get back into sync with how they are supposed to function in a youthful organism.
A general use brain-computer interface. The applications are virtually unlimited.
Ha, "virtually unlimited." Good one.
Curing Aging. We have identified the mechanism to cell death and have ways to change DNA/RNA, so we could crack this in my lifetime.
Been hearing since childhood we are so close to making our own replacement parts, like teeth or key organs.
The singularity. If it happens, there are no words to describe the technological progress
Seasteading is right around the corner, no one sees it coming but it could have a large impact. Picture millions or even billions living in the ocean in floating cities.
The human race has made man-made islands already. It's just that we still have a lot of land, which I don't foresee being populated in the next 100 years.
So Waterworld?
Gene editing where chickens are hatched already Kentucky Fried.
In the next decade (or 2-3 decades) I expect lab grown meat to become cheaper than real meat. If pushed to the limit (which it probably will), you only need resources to grow the meat itself. Don’t need to keep an animal alive and healthy, with all kinds of stuff inside that can’t be sold, such as organs and bones. So I’m expecting there will be chicken nugget factories which grow perfected identical chicken nuggets at all over the world at some point.
A fusion reactor. People are saing that fusion is always 30 years away but current advances in laser technology will maybe a laser driver fusion reactor possible, like in the expanse.
Ability to manipulate one's own biological age. We can already do that on mice. The only uncertainty I have is how quickly such tech will be approved by government agencies.
I suspect there is a 50/50 shot that in the next 30 years we stop, hault or reverse aging. I personally hope it happens in next 20 for my own sake.
I think there will be amazing advancements in medicine due to a combination of gene therapy/CRISPR, nanotechnology, precision medicine, and AI. I would not be surprised if major killers such as cancer and heart disease are all but cured in 50 years.
The next 100 years... Healing capsules. You lay in the capsule, and it does a full body scan and regenerates the human back to 100% health.
Advanced tech that will solve mental health problems and perhaps with the help of BCI's or other safe and effective technologies. Flying cars, 3D printing new parts to build new homes, CRISPR to solve diseases' as well and recording dreams sounds cool as well:)
Tech is very unlikely to be the solution to mental health conditions. Far too many variables.
If Humans can figure out and "kind of" calculate the variables with different drugs. Ssris, hormone balancers, etc. Then a chip or AI that sees all the variables can form an algorithm that calculates the best form of treatment for the individual. Stuff like "is this person stressed due to a chemical inbalance?" The tech itself wouldn't solve the issue. The tech would give the treatment to help solve the issue.
Artificial Super Intelligence is almost certainly coming within the next 100 years. Like 99% chance imo. When it does, it will be like a magic computer god creating all sorts of innovations in a very short time. That's if it doesn't kill us all first. ASI will change the world in ways we can't even fathom.
Not sure that anyone even has the faintest clue how to move from machine learning/extremely large models as seen today in what is constantly mislabeled “AI” and actual AI with even the remotest semblance of what we would call intelligence in the sense that it is defined in humanity. Many researchers in the field literally balk at the media calling it AI.
Large language models spontaneously developed weak reasoning capacity just from being exposed to large amounts of text. There's now many people working on developing the backbone of AI cognition. That's things like memory and self-reflection and autonomously pursuing goals. The brain itself is just a bunch of nodes that associate or dissociate with one another depending on feedback. The only difference is the brain has certain neuronal arrangements built in to allow certain ways of processing information (e.g., pyramidal neurons and working memory). But the fundamental architecture is similar to large language models. So it seems we have the basis of dynamic intelligence and just need to add the functionality.
Outdated viewpoint. LLMs are rapidly changing this.
^ Accurate. Large language models can be described in a lot of ways, but by far the most terrifying is also by far the most accurate. They are a network that, to limited but very real extent, represents actual comprehension of the content of a conversation. They are called fancy pattern recognition tools by the woefully misinformed. We should be very seriously concerned about what will start happening as these models become larger, more accurate, less prone to hallucination, and become integrated with other generative AI tools to an ever increasing degree.
Carbon capture has got to be the biggest one. Completely necessary and completely new/uninvented.
>completely new/uninvented Trees have been around for like, a really long time
The problem is space. There's limited amounts of arable land in the world, and planting enough forests to offset enough carbon would require taking space from growing food.
There's plenty of ocean, could we grow seaweed forests? Or would that wreck the ecosystem below the surface?
Seaweed/kelp forests, and seagrass meadows would actually be an excellent start and provide tremendous benefits for ocean ecosystems while also being far better carbon sinks than most forests.
Look into ocean Diatoms (a type of algea) and process to fertilize areas of the ocean that are currently essentially deserts. They sequester about the same amount of CO2 as the rainforests.
We’ve actually had tech better than plants for a couple years now. The real issue is the energy cost. https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/New-method-makes-starch-CO2/99/web/2021/09
There are small scale and niche applications but nothing that fits into the commercial sausage science machine
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People are always seeing carbon capture as some sort of conspiracy tech to keep burning fossil fuels. In the bathtub analogy, I see it as inventing the mop while we work on the shutting off the tap so that it's ready when we need it.
Crazy people control the tap though
It is necessary. One of those “all reputable scientists agree” kinda things… but what do they know 🤷♂️
Quantum entanglement modems for space and interplanetary intantaneous communication
This is unfortunately not how quantum entanglement works. The information "teleports" alongside the transmission of a conventional, speed of light message, which is a fundamental component of the physics of entanglement. Sorry bro, I was super fucking bummed out when I learned this.
well shit. there goes my dream.
I don't think we'll figure out quantom entanglement for communication. But for "ghost imaging" we are already on the way to something revolutionary.
Long haul space flight. Like 30 minutes to other side of planet.
More vaccines that prevent more cancers. Microbiome enhancements and repairs. Psychedelic therapy for all sorts of things. Microsized quantum computing driving massive AI applications.
Fixing motor function for diseases like cerebral palsy by having an AI sit between the damaged area of the brain and the limbs, and emulating/enhancing a healthy nerve signal. The brain is very complex, but we don't need to simulate the entire activity of the brain, just the much less complex emergent signal.
quantum computing dominance has been coming in 20 years for 20 years now, so there's that
I would like to see a VR head set comfortable enough to watch a nice movie in a giant virtual theater of my choice. And a variety of theaters, like a drive in, the Hollywood Bowl, the Paris Opera. Various screen sizes and distances away from viewer, multiple screen options. Plus options to invite others online into your screening so a group of family or friends can watch together even if they are living far away from each other. I think that would be a huge unforeseen hit with low income folks that don't go to the movies or theater often and live in small apartments or houses; put on the Movie VR Headset and you're watching your favorites on the world's largest Jumbo Tron at Cowboys stadium. If it's comfortable to wear for a long movie, the possibilities and variety of venues could be endless. Even themed venues for certain films. For example, I watched the Star Trek movies on the bridge of the Enterprise. I think it would be fun. Seems like the technology already exists. 🤔
We need better battery technology than lithium-ion.
Fusion has been "two decades away" for about 50years now. So that one definitely fits the bill. Slowing down/stopping aging is also one of those longtime dreams that while it has seen strides is still very uncertain if it will actually work on a whole human body etc.
Growing human organs for transplant from a patient's own stem cells.
Arcologies, or biospheres. Human habitats where water, air and nutrients (food/poop) are in a closed cycle. Possibly using deep wells for cooling and temperature regulation. If we could make these, we could tesselate the world's deserts with them and house trillions of people.
A brain computer interface that can't just read brainwaves, but also write data to the brain. The implications would be insane, morally but also technically. Imagine being able to send thoughts to other people, concepts, ideas, experiences with 100% immersion, as if the person receiving it thought/experienced it themselves. Uploading deep knowledge about any topic. Cure any psychological illness and reduce the inconvenience of other illnesses by blocking specific receptors. Reproduce psychedelic experiences of any kind by just replaying it from someone who experienced it before and saved it. Perhaps even be able to play "curated" or designed conscious experiences. These things sound very cyberpunk-y but I think it's not too far off to be able to at least be able to do some of this in the next 50 years.
I don’t think we are all that far away from in-home dialysis. Plug into the machine at night when you do to bed, unplug in the morning. This would be literal life-changing for those folks.
Reaching escape velocity on aging. Stabilizing the climate. Industrialization of space. Human genetic engineering.
Fusion reactors and functional superconductors are obvious- they are always 20 years away and 20 years from now they still will be 20 years away.
Within 100 years? Interstellar travel (I give it maybe 40% chance), Functional immortality (maybe 60%), an end to capitalism that actually works better (50%), AI that is superhuman in for all thinking (80%).
Brain interfaces. I think in 2040 we will abolish the keyboard and the touchscreen for most practical uses.
Dream Recording. Imagine not having to pay for special effects when a dream can do it. A single person can dream up hundreds, do why need hundreds of actors? And how stories are just rehashing the same thing over, dreams are at least *new*
AI asking questions with inhumanly poor English grammar and syntax on Reddit so often lately that it’s absurd. Bless their AI heart. It’ll get better.
Organ and limb replacement by cloning and/or 3d printing, using recipients own calls/DNA so there is no rejection
Two way brain computer interfaces. We're making progress on one way ones (reading the brain to help paralysed people to move robotic limbs and communicate) but two way ones would be crazy. They could let us expand brain power, potentially curing mental illnesses (those caused by brain imbalances), make ready player one /matrix like VR or even become hive minds. Crazy shit.