That’s not really how it works, or we’d already have them. People in China have those things because they beat the fascist KMT back to Formosa, and by force subordinated the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism.
It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.
Recently quoted by Bruce Lee, than in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
I thought VR/AR would be farther along. There was a pitch 10 years ago that VR would be the “final platform” in that anything a phone, TV, tablet, or computer could do could be easily emulated in VR.
Unfortunately it’s still all walled gardens. Also nobody wants to wear that shit for more than an hour.
There are a few that you can buy, they just aren't cheap. KAT Walk is a usable omni-"treadmill", FreeAim has their motorized shoes. Again, not cheap, but still within the budget of a motivated enthusiast.
Yeah, you coukd extend the social media reality bubbles ppl are living in to actual perceived reality. You coukd also block out homeless people and this hyper individuallism that it wouod enable would stop those kinds of problems from having any hope of being solved.
When I was a kid in the 80s I thought we'd absolutely have some kind of moon base by now. More space stuff in general. What is more "future" than space?
Green energy is maybe 10 years behind where younger me would have wished it to be, it feels we're close to some big breakthroughs. I'm still hopefully to see some game changing things in my lifetime.
There's just really not a very useful reason outside of "because we can", so it hasn't really been a priority. Still, that's kinda the point of the Artemis program, so we're getting there.
Usefulness is no fun. Those 80s and 90s attitudes wouldn't worry about something like that. We'd have done it just show off and/or to keep the Soviets from doing it first. Don't tell us we have rocks at home, I want space rocks. I want a bucket full of ice from the rings of Saturn. I want a slab of something that got melted by Venus. That stuff is cool.
I hope they do something fun with Artemis. It doesn't feel like most people are excited for space anymore and that bums me out.
For All Mankind is coming back in a few days, so that will have to do for now.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It's 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments...
I understand that it's probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it's still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
Oh that's a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don't even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won't exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling 'boob' light).
I've been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee's basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I'm a pretty small sample size. I know I'm paying a premium for that approach, but it's not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
Something is wrong with the ones you're buying, then.
Studies show that they do, on average, last dozens of times longer. Personally I replace them way less often than incandescent.
I suppose the earliest ones were worse and there are definitely garbage ones out there. And even good brands have a did here and there. And if you have poor/inconsistent power, or placing them in hot, enclosed fixtures, they don't perform as well as they could.
From my experience, what tends to get messed up is the internal wiring. The actual leds will continue working fine, but cheap/shitty wiring will make the lamp stop working
Better general medical science. So much of what we use is very old tech. We still can't regrow cartligage. We still pin bones together with titanium screws. We still mostly use fiberglass casts (though better alternatives exist). We still catch the common cold.
When I went to the hospital for a broken bone, I thought this tech was already there since tech was advancing so quickly, going from Pac-Man to Super Mario 64 in 16 years.
My vision:
'At the very least I'll get to see a 3D image of my broken bone and maybe there'll be 'dentist chair tools' that can straighten and fill up the bone like a dentist does with your teeth. I mean, we advanced a lot in computer technology right?'
The reality:
'Here's your 1950s X-ray picture. You see that Rorschach test blotch? That's where it's broken. We've done our job, have a good day!... Your visit is over!... You can leave now!...'
The thing is, we could do that right now. But it's more expensive and increases patient exposure to radiation and is just unnecessary. Right tool for the job, if it ain't broke etc.
Commonplace genetic counselling for more than just pregnancy.
Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
Cloned tissues (i.e. blood, skin), organs (i.e. heart, lungs, kidneys) for transplant or repair.
I graduated university the same year the Human Genome Project first published completion. Certainly, that project uncovered more questions than answers.
Also, we've done an absolutely garbage job of becoming appropriate stewards of this technology. Primarily, today, it would be used to identify, segregate, subjugate, and eventually kill a portion of the population.
Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
I feel that for laws to exist, you first need some accidents to prompt the public outcry to get them passed. And accidents in genetics are going to be very messy indeed
More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it's just accepted. I've grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It's not novel if it's broken.
Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.
I thought we would finally have haptic touchscreens in our devices. There were some experiments in the past, but it never happened outside of niche industry applications.
Makes me a little bit sad, because being able to feel elements is really useful - I can type blind on my Titan 2 phone (which has a real keyboard) and in cars, it would really improve safety.
I think it depends on what you mean when you say "synthetic meat".
I use quorn mince when I'm making spaghetti bolognese and lasagne. If you add marmite to the "mince" when you're doing the initial cook the final dish is indistinguishable from real meat tbh.
I agree that other meat replacements aren't the same and probably won't be for a while, although Aldi have recently started selling something that resembles a steak which I want to try.
Ah right. I wanted to check, I thought that stuff was ultra rare? Have they started mass producing it?
I totally agree that plant based stuff isn't the same (although I like it, matter of taste I guess), but I thought the whole point of lab grown would be that it is identical?
I'm not a vegan but I do believe that eating meat from an animal that suffered it's whole life surely passes on to the person who consumed it.
I don't eat meat that often but when I do I always buy free range.
I tell people, even if you can't go vegetarian or vegan (I'm one of those) you can reduce your consumption of animal products. Be more mindful of wasting animal products and always buy free range when possible.
If everyone scales back a bit that would make a huge difference.
I too thought self driving cars would be further along. It just seemed like they were already decent... so 5 to 10 more years... and we are not much further. We have self driving cars in some select cities, but they still struggle even then.
I thought we would be able to redo our dna in adults using viruses or other vectors completely. Where we are now I thought we would be in like 2010. So we are making progress but I thought we would be farther along and genetic disease would be a thinf of the past.
I was hoping that by now technology and education would have helped all the humans to realize how to take care of each other and work together for a better tomorrow.
Instead we got this fucking mess that's going on right now all around the world.
I thought that by now we would've commercialized at scale alternative battery technologies. We're still using lithium ion even for grid storage and EV's.
Also, I expected we would have put a man on the moon by now.
Maybe give cars a second pair of axles, to keep them aligned with the overhead power on the highway and to reduce the tire wear. Maybe join them together too so each individual car doesn't have to worry about braking and the driver can basically just sleep.
This isn't me sarcastically reinventing trains. I see why people would rather spend their commute in a private car than in a public train carriage. These features just seem genuinely useful.
What I have sarcastically reinvented is basically just self-driving cars.
Good music. Why does music in the 21st century have to suck so bad? It's not that much different than what we had in the 20th century, the quality just steadily decreased instead of increased. It's all divas screaming, really boring rap, or just dull, art-less rock.
Today, even young people are discovering that the Classic Rock era had very cool music. It would have been like my generation discovering the music of the pre-war 30s.
I like music from the decade before my birth and swing became big at one point and many folk discover there is a lot of classical music they like. I get what your saying but like there is a lot of historical crap pop to which is kinda always around.
Cool, I have a degree in Music History, and you are 100% correct, there is a LOT of bad historical music. Luckily, we don't have to deal with it much, because most of it has been filtered out over time.
There's a loose rule in all Art, that 95% of art is mostly mediocre. Only about 5% is worthy, and only about 1% is truly good, or great. When youre in the midst of it, most of what you are hearing is junk, and you have to be the filter, and it can be exhausting.
But if you go back to the old stuff, it's basically been curated by critics and fans over the decades, and mostly the best stuff has survived, so it's easier to find great, satisfying music.
And if you're ambitious, you can sort through the debris, and find the odd forgotten classic rock gem, like Shoes:
I wonder about that in the modern age though. I mean there has to be a factor of how easy it is to copy and store. So likely a lot was lost before performance recording capability. In the car I mostly listen to npr but when I don't care for whats on I will just sorta jump between stations and there is a thing now for stations to kinda take a time period but they don't seem to be very discriminatory about it. On the other hand now that we can call up any song we want likely you will see the cream come up to the top on what gets asked for a lot. I have one particular gripe though because my fav band tull had this album crafting they did where the position of songs, especially the first and last, were real important. They have these special editions they kinda just tacked songs on them and it ruins the flow. Its impossible, at least with amazon, to get the device to do the original vs the special edition that it defaults to.
Yeah, one of the cool things about the Classic Rock era was how real artists would program their albums for flow. The Beatles were really the first to do that, and they completely changed music industry sales from a single format to an album format, which was far more profitable for both artists, and record companies, which only encouraged more people to become musicians, and record companies to make more albums.
So, yeah, when you get some special edition, and they start inserting alternate or demo or live versions INTO the original program, it totally fucks up the artist's intentions.
Luckily most of the time, they give us a nicely remastered version of the original on a disc alone, and all the other stuff on a separate disc.
But that's only if you use CDs, which more and more people are going back to, fortunately. I never left, I still have my original CD collection, about 5000 of them. Don't get excited I was in the music biz for years, a LOT of them were free, but still good. Got a killer discount, too, basically manufacturing cost, so about $3 a CD, back in the 90s. I would buy the entire catalogue of a band like Led Zeppelin, or Prince, or Talking Heads, or the Eagles, etc.
As for music from before recordings, I don't even like to think about it. Many of the great composers, like Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven were known to be astonishing virtuoso keyboard players, who could improvise incredibly complex music on the spot. At a concert, the guest of honor, usually some local VIP, would supply a tune, and they would play it on the piano, and then build an entire work out of thin air in front of the audience. Can you imagine hearing a recording of that?
If you're talking about modern pop, I completely agree. But there's so much amazing music coming out every year, way better than anything before it imo. My guess is if you really do want to find great new music, then you're not exploring enough. Or maybe you're happy with what you already know.
A lot of the problem is that most men grow up listening to rap, and women grow up listening to divas, and if they don't listen to those genres, then they listen to country. So many young musicians are growing up listening to mediocre quality music, and they tend to slip into genres that are somewhat less competitive, artistically, like Rap or Country.
That leaves fewer musicians to carry on the Classic Rock tradition. Besides, what's the point? The fact is, the Classic Rock era turned out the best popular music of all time. That sound like a wild statement on its face, but it really is true. What band emerging now seems like it could be the next Beatles, or Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd? I can't think of a band that threatened to have that kind of influence since Nirvana.
There have been a few worthy artists, like Adele, and a few truly great singers, like Ariana Grande, but there are no other superstar Rock artists whose talents are undeniable, like Michael Jackson, or Prince.
Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Adele, and Ariana Grande are about all I can think of, and that is over about 30 years. Compare that with the 60s or 70s, or even the 80s, when artists were establishing MASSIVE careers that would last decades, on a monthly basis. At the end of the year, you were listening to a dozen classic albums by bands you hadn't heard of a year ago, and another dozen classic albums by your favorite bands. GREAT music was just pouring out, and it became popular not because of an enormous marketing campaign, but because the music was great, and the word spread. Hardly any of Pink Floyd's music was ever on the radio, and yet they established a career and a catalogue that sells to this day. Taylor Swift seems huge, but back in the day, she would have been outsold by a dozen other artists.
So why even bother re-inventing the wheel? There is already about 50 years of AMAZING music that young people today have never heard. I always get downvoted when I say this, but they are from people who don't know what they are missing, and think today's music is perfectly acceptable.
The music of the 60s and 70s inspired my to pursue a life and career in music. Today's music would not have inspired me at all.
I know a lot of people who would completely agree with you, so maybe there was something special about the 60s, 70 & 80s. Many artists today even list those classics as their inspiration. But it depends on taste too. I personally think the conventional rock genre is worn out. So if you're only into that then maybe it isn't worth exploring further.
I also agree that most artists today only seem to hit a couple of great albums at most before they fade. I think there's more to greatness than popularity, but yeah there's not many artists producing amazing music consistently for decades. There's a few, but fans also seem to move on quickly as well now.
But I do think the talent and great music is absolutely there. It just might not be in the form you want.
Rock was very controversial when it first started right? Thinking Elvis. And I'd say that's opened the doors to a huge variety of new genres. To the point where the concept of genre can't even categorise what we have today. Artists have so much more creative freedom now imo.
And I expect there's way more active musicians today as well, so people's attention is spread across so many different artists and styles.
I can't speak for conventional rock, a lot of what I listen to is considered alternative/indie rock, and I don't know how to measure greatness, but the music I'm hearing today is for me, much more artistically and emotionally impactful than anything I've heard before.
There is very good 21st century music, which wouldn't have come had it not been for 20th century music.
Thinking igorrr, emergence of gqom (that's very pop for gqom), post rock emerged in the 20th and has a reminiscence of tripped out 70s rock bands, but bands like thee silver mount zion are also very early 21st century.
It's also not surprising we are hitting a barrier after electroacoustic music sort of enlarged the field a lot, the last major innovations were sunths, electronic soundFX and DAWs and these are all 20th century changes. The 20th century saw more innovation than the previous centuries. Fusion of styles, while older, has given interesting merges in the 21st century as well.
But the 20th century will be hard to surpass, pretty much as by the end of the 19th century classical music was running circles.
Realistically?
Housing that doesn't cost a fortune
Healthcare that doesn't bankrupt you
Food that's both affordable and worth eating
None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.
That's not tech, that's policy. Technologically there are no holdups to this, capitalism just needs it to not be so
Your answer is something you want to force into the conversation, not what OP asked.
You're not wrong, but that's not the conversation man.
Yeah, the reason we don't have those isn't technological. We could have it today if we collectively decided that we wanted it.
That’s not really how it works, or we’d already have them. People in China have those things because they beat the fascist KMT back to Formosa, and by force subordinated the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism.
Well, that plus militant organizing
As it is written in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra:
Recently quoted by Bruce Lee, than in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
I thought VR/AR would be farther along. There was a pitch 10 years ago that VR would be the “final platform” in that anything a phone, TV, tablet, or computer could do could be easily emulated in VR.
Unfortunately it’s still all walled gardens. Also nobody wants to wear that shit for more than an hour.
More specifically I thought one of the approaches to an omni-treadmill would catch on enough for an at-home model to be available to the public.
There are a few that you can buy, they just aren't cheap. KAT Walk is a usable omni-"treadmill", FreeAim has their motorized shoes. Again, not cheap, but still within the budget of a motivated enthusiast.
Brain implants are progressing, so I'm still hopeful to see full-dive VR in my lifetime. Also scared of how it will be enshtitfied.
Yeah... as amazing as full dive VR would be, I'd be afraid that weaponized would be a better term for how it would be implemented than enshitified.
Yeah, you coukd extend the social media reality bubbles ppl are living in to actual perceived reality. You coukd also block out homeless people and this hyper individuallism that it wouod enable would stop those kinds of problems from having any hope of being solved.
I feel dumb for buying the valve index.
When I was a kid in the 80s I thought we'd absolutely have some kind of moon base by now. More space stuff in general. What is more "future" than space?
Green energy is maybe 10 years behind where younger me would have wished it to be, it feels we're close to some big breakthroughs. I'm still hopefully to see some game changing things in my lifetime.
There's just really not a very useful reason outside of "because we can", so it hasn't really been a priority. Still, that's kinda the point of the Artemis program, so we're getting there.
Usefulness is no fun. Those 80s and 90s attitudes wouldn't worry about something like that. We'd have done it just show off and/or to keep the Soviets from doing it first. Don't tell us we have rocks at home, I want space rocks. I want a bucket full of ice from the rings of Saturn. I want a slab of something that got melted by Venus. That stuff is cool.
I hope they do something fun with Artemis. It doesn't feel like most people are excited for space anymore and that bums me out.
For All Mankind is coming back in a few days, so that will have to do for now.
Eh, the 80s and 90s were a marked shift towards usefulness. Gotta maximize shareholder value, dontcha know.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It's 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments...
I understand that it's probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it's still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
Oh that's a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
This is common (engineered predictable fault.)
The Phoebus Cartel was objectively terrible, but it turns out there are perfectly good engineering reasons to limit them to 1000 hours. It has to do with the chemistry of tungsten. Those bulbs that last forever give off exceedingly little light, and the 1000 hour rule is from a standard that predates the cartel.
That was clearly not an engineer.
Life cycle cost analyses are typically done by engineers.
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don't even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won't exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling 'boob' light).
I've been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee's basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I'm a pretty small sample size. I know I'm paying a premium for that approach, but it's not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
Something is wrong with the ones you're buying, then.
Studies show that they do, on average, last dozens of times longer. Personally I replace them way less often than incandescent.
I suppose the earliest ones were worse and there are definitely garbage ones out there. And even good brands have a did here and there. And if you have poor/inconsistent power, or placing them in hot, enclosed fixtures, they don't perform as well as they could.
I bought some on clearance about a decade ago, my wife thought I was crazy buying 20 bulbs, I gave 1/4 of them away and I've still not run out.
Who were the studies done by? Philips?
The DOE, Energy Star, others
From my experience, what tends to get messed up is the internal wiring. The actual leds will continue working fine, but cheap/shitty wiring will make the lamp stop working
I was there for the transition period between incandescents and LEDs: The CFL.
I broke a CFL pretty early on and noped out of using CFLs.
Yeah, I had more than one sheer off trying to put one in or unscrew one.
Buy dimmer, filament style LEDs. They don't burn themselves out hy heat at least.
Otherwise you're facing planned obsolescence.
I've never had to replace my LED lights and I've had mine for a decade.
Better general medical science. So much of what we use is very old tech. We still can't regrow cartligage. We still pin bones together with titanium screws. We still mostly use fiberglass casts (though better alternatives exist). We still catch the common cold.
When I went to the hospital for a broken bone, I thought this tech was already there since tech was advancing so quickly, going from Pac-Man to Super Mario 64 in 16 years.
My vision:
'At the very least I'll get to see a 3D image of my broken bone and maybe there'll be 'dentist chair tools' that can straighten and fill up the bone like a dentist does with your teeth. I mean, we advanced a lot in computer technology right?'
The reality:
'Here's your 1950s X-ray picture. You see that Rorschach test blotch? That's where it's broken. We've done our job, have a good day!... Your visit is over!... You can leave now!...'
That was 30 years ago.
The thing is, we could do that right now. But it's more expensive and increases patient exposure to radiation and is just unnecessary. Right tool for the job, if it ain't broke etc.
Ironic choice of words
A deliberate sprinkling of irony helps me cope with existence
You and me both buddy, although "sprinkling" somewhat understates my general approach.
I thought we'd have affordable 8TB SSD's.
I'll cut you a deal: I'll hold onto your data for you—including data you never even asked me to hold—and you only have to pay me for forever. Good?
Ability to live in balance with the earth
Only after the nuclear winter
Genetic-level diagnoses and treatments.
Inexpensive, rapid genome sequencing.
Commonplace genetic counselling for more than just pregnancy.
Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
Cloned tissues (i.e. blood, skin), organs (i.e. heart, lungs, kidneys) for transplant or repair.
I graduated university the same year the Human Genome Project first published completion. Certainly, that project uncovered more questions than answers.
Also, we've done an absolutely garbage job of becoming appropriate stewards of this technology. Primarily, today, it would be used to identify, segregate, subjugate, and eventually kill a portion of the population.
I feel that for laws to exist, you first need some accidents to prompt the public outcry to get them passed. And accidents in genetics are going to be very messy indeed
Genetic counseling is common for rare cancers. It is used in some in some populations who are prone to generic diseases.
Computer phones. As in I just connect to screen and keyboard, and phone is my main desktop.
Cheaper EVs.
Working lab fusion.
Like the Motorola Atrix
https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-does-the-motorola-atrix-4g-lapdock-compare-with-a-laptop/?edge_reader_page
Too ahead of its time.
If its just for a productivity office type work, samsung phones can do this but it is account locked which is annoying
That's still weak compared to what a phone could really do though.
Absolutely. My phone is more powerful than my family pc from 2007 by a mile
Wasn't that something proposed in windows phone? I can't remember and am too lazy to look it up
Android 16 brings that desktop functionality
EVs are pretty cheap now. How cheap did you think?
Slightly cheaper than fuel by 10% for similar cars (including country of origin)
As cheap as gasoline cars
They are. You can get an atto 1 for 25k AUD. Lots of options in the 30-40k aud range. A petrol corolla is 32k, so they're comparable.
Compassion, empathy, socialism.
Fusion lol.
Better space tech or at least a moon base.
Modular body parts like in cyberpunk
Technically we have modular body parts. They are pretty damn good too. Just not good enough that people would replace them because they are vetter.
Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets
Really fancy guillotines, with Internet Access, Bluetooth, and AI, of course.
"I'm Alan, your Virtual Execution Assistant. I can offer you a choice of a Last Cigarette, or Last Words, which would you like to choose?"
"Quick and painless, or slow and horrible?"
More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it's just accepted. I've grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It's not novel if it's broken.
Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.
Phones that can be opened up and have internals replaced, like desktop computers
So like the Fairphone?
That one is still exclusive to a few select countries and won't ship to mine :/
Oh no :(
I thought we would finally have haptic touchscreens in our devices. There were some experiments in the past, but it never happened outside of niche industry applications.
Makes me a little bit sad, because being able to feel elements is really useful - I can type blind on my Titan 2 phone (which has a real keyboard) and in cars, it would really improve safety.
What would improve car safety is you beeing focused on handling your car and nothing else
Yes, by being able to feel the controls so can focus your eyes on the road in front of you.
Synthetic meat that's actually edible/palatable
We have that already and I've eaten it.
I've tried a lot and have not found any of it very appetizing.
Most has a very rubbery texture as soon as it cools slightly.
Very unpleasant.
I'd rather just not have any meat than have it.
But it you have had the good stuff, please send me your recommendations.
Good synthetic meat exists, it's just more expensive to produce so you usually can't buy it at like a corner store or something
I think it depends on what you mean when you say "synthetic meat".
I use quorn mince when I'm making spaghetti bolognese and lasagne. If you add marmite to the "mince" when you're doing the initial cook the final dish is indistinguishable from real meat tbh.
I agree that other meat replacements aren't the same and probably won't be for a while, although Aldi have recently started selling something that resembles a steak which I want to try.
I interpreted this as real meat tissue grown synthetically rather that minced ingredients that mimics meat.
Ah right. I wanted to check, I thought that stuff was ultra rare? Have they started mass producing it?
I totally agree that plant based stuff isn't the same (although I like it, matter of taste I guess), but I thought the whole point of lab grown would be that it is identical?
Don't know actually. I've never heard of it for sale. Turns out that wasn't what they meant, but I wouldn't have thought it was so hard to make.
I refer to - Not meat from animals.
Then what products are you referring to?
Synthetic meat is the "meat alternative" meat.
Not made from animals. Or at least not from dead animals.
I'm open to synthetic meats made from eggs.
It's hard to synthesize the animal suffering that people crave
That is objectively a silly thing to say.
I'm not a vegan but I do believe that eating meat from an animal that suffered it's whole life surely passes on to the person who consumed it.
I don't eat meat that often but when I do I always buy free range.
I tell people, even if you can't go vegetarian or vegan (I'm one of those) you can reduce your consumption of animal products. Be more mindful of wasting animal products and always buy free range when possible.
If everyone scales back a bit that would make a huge difference.
Level 4 self driving cars.
I too thought self driving cars would be further along. It just seemed like they were already decent... so 5 to 10 more years... and we are not much further. We have self driving cars in some select cities, but they still struggle even then.
Those thin transparent screens you see in sci fi movies.
I definitely thought we’d have Ar glasses by now
this
Hoverboards.
I think the self tightening shoes would have been doable. But we still didn't get those.
Nike actually did make those. they sell them.
Windshield wipers that don't smear.
Self driving cars. Ten years ago I said, "we'll have this worked out in 10 years". What a fool I was.
Elmo has claimed to have it for over 10 years now
You weren't a fool, you simply were lied to
Elmo always lies, every second word put of his mouth is a lie. Every project he boasts about has been a lie.
I thought we would be able to redo our dna in adults using viruses or other vectors completely. Where we are now I thought we would be in like 2010. So we are making progress but I thought we would be farther along and genetic disease would be a thinf of the past.
Actual hoverboards, as promised.
A cure for all diseases and illnesses.
You thought this would happen by 2026?
I was hoping that by now technology and education would have helped all the humans to realize how to take care of each other and work together for a better tomorrow.
Instead we got this fucking mess that's going on right now all around the world.
It's really that. All that technology and we still didn't solve the most primitive and basic problems in this world's community.
Recycling that actually works.
I thought that by now we would've commercialized at scale alternative battery technologies. We're still using lithium ion even for grid storage and EV's.
Also, I expected we would have put a man on the moon by now.
Maybe give cars a second pair of axles, to keep them aligned with the overhead power on the highway and to reduce the tire wear. Maybe join them together too so each individual car doesn't have to worry about braking and the driver can basically just sleep.
This isn't me sarcastically reinventing trains. I see why people would rather spend their commute in a private car than in a public train carriage. These features just seem genuinely useful.
What I have sarcastically reinvented is basically just self-driving cars.
Standardized connector for everything with backwards compatibility
External scans for prostate cancer.
Maglev trains in the US
Brit on a train; A phone network that would offer a reasonable level of connectivity no matter where you are in the country.
Ours definitely took a few steps back early 2023.
AI dildos
Good music. Why does music in the 21st century have to suck so bad? It's not that much different than what we had in the 20th century, the quality just steadily decreased instead of increased. It's all divas screaming, really boring rap, or just dull, art-less rock.
Today, even young people are discovering that the Classic Rock era had very cool music. It would have been like my generation discovering the music of the pre-war 30s.
I like music from the decade before my birth and swing became big at one point and many folk discover there is a lot of classical music they like. I get what your saying but like there is a lot of historical crap pop to which is kinda always around.
Cool, I have a degree in Music History, and you are 100% correct, there is a LOT of bad historical music. Luckily, we don't have to deal with it much, because most of it has been filtered out over time.
There's a loose rule in all Art, that 95% of art is mostly mediocre. Only about 5% is worthy, and only about 1% is truly good, or great. When youre in the midst of it, most of what you are hearing is junk, and you have to be the filter, and it can be exhausting.
But if you go back to the old stuff, it's basically been curated by critics and fans over the decades, and mostly the best stuff has survived, so it's easier to find great, satisfying music.
And if you're ambitious, you can sort through the debris, and find the odd forgotten classic rock gem, like Shoes:
Too Late
Tomorrow Night
Or Yaz:
Only You
Or Bread:
Diary
I wonder about that in the modern age though. I mean there has to be a factor of how easy it is to copy and store. So likely a lot was lost before performance recording capability. In the car I mostly listen to npr but when I don't care for whats on I will just sorta jump between stations and there is a thing now for stations to kinda take a time period but they don't seem to be very discriminatory about it. On the other hand now that we can call up any song we want likely you will see the cream come up to the top on what gets asked for a lot. I have one particular gripe though because my fav band tull had this album crafting they did where the position of songs, especially the first and last, were real important. They have these special editions they kinda just tacked songs on them and it ruins the flow. Its impossible, at least with amazon, to get the device to do the original vs the special edition that it defaults to.
Yeah, one of the cool things about the Classic Rock era was how real artists would program their albums for flow. The Beatles were really the first to do that, and they completely changed music industry sales from a single format to an album format, which was far more profitable for both artists, and record companies, which only encouraged more people to become musicians, and record companies to make more albums.
So, yeah, when you get some special edition, and they start inserting alternate or demo or live versions INTO the original program, it totally fucks up the artist's intentions.
Luckily most of the time, they give us a nicely remastered version of the original on a disc alone, and all the other stuff on a separate disc.
But that's only if you use CDs, which more and more people are going back to, fortunately. I never left, I still have my original CD collection, about 5000 of them. Don't get excited I was in the music biz for years, a LOT of them were free, but still good. Got a killer discount, too, basically manufacturing cost, so about $3 a CD, back in the 90s. I would buy the entire catalogue of a band like Led Zeppelin, or Prince, or Talking Heads, or the Eagles, etc.
As for music from before recordings, I don't even like to think about it. Many of the great composers, like Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven were known to be astonishing virtuoso keyboard players, who could improvise incredibly complex music on the spot. At a concert, the guest of honor, usually some local VIP, would supply a tune, and they would play it on the piano, and then build an entire work out of thin air in front of the audience. Can you imagine hearing a recording of that?
If you're talking about modern pop, I completely agree. But there's so much amazing music coming out every year, way better than anything before it imo. My guess is if you really do want to find great new music, then you're not exploring enough. Or maybe you're happy with what you already know.
I am talking about Modern Pop, and Rock.
A lot of the problem is that most men grow up listening to rap, and women grow up listening to divas, and if they don't listen to those genres, then they listen to country. So many young musicians are growing up listening to mediocre quality music, and they tend to slip into genres that are somewhat less competitive, artistically, like Rap or Country.
That leaves fewer musicians to carry on the Classic Rock tradition. Besides, what's the point? The fact is, the Classic Rock era turned out the best popular music of all time. That sound like a wild statement on its face, but it really is true. What band emerging now seems like it could be the next Beatles, or Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd? I can't think of a band that threatened to have that kind of influence since Nirvana.
There have been a few worthy artists, like Adele, and a few truly great singers, like Ariana Grande, but there are no other superstar Rock artists whose talents are undeniable, like Michael Jackson, or Prince.
Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Adele, and Ariana Grande are about all I can think of, and that is over about 30 years. Compare that with the 60s or 70s, or even the 80s, when artists were establishing MASSIVE careers that would last decades, on a monthly basis. At the end of the year, you were listening to a dozen classic albums by bands you hadn't heard of a year ago, and another dozen classic albums by your favorite bands. GREAT music was just pouring out, and it became popular not because of an enormous marketing campaign, but because the music was great, and the word spread. Hardly any of Pink Floyd's music was ever on the radio, and yet they established a career and a catalogue that sells to this day. Taylor Swift seems huge, but back in the day, she would have been outsold by a dozen other artists.
So why even bother re-inventing the wheel? There is already about 50 years of AMAZING music that young people today have never heard. I always get downvoted when I say this, but they are from people who don't know what they are missing, and think today's music is perfectly acceptable.
The music of the 60s and 70s inspired my to pursue a life and career in music. Today's music would not have inspired me at all.
I know a lot of people who would completely agree with you, so maybe there was something special about the 60s, 70 & 80s. Many artists today even list those classics as their inspiration. But it depends on taste too. I personally think the conventional rock genre is worn out. So if you're only into that then maybe it isn't worth exploring further.
I also agree that most artists today only seem to hit a couple of great albums at most before they fade. I think there's more to greatness than popularity, but yeah there's not many artists producing amazing music consistently for decades. There's a few, but fans also seem to move on quickly as well now.
But I do think the talent and great music is absolutely there. It just might not be in the form you want.
Rock was very controversial when it first started right? Thinking Elvis. And I'd say that's opened the doors to a huge variety of new genres. To the point where the concept of genre can't even categorise what we have today. Artists have so much more creative freedom now imo.
And I expect there's way more active musicians today as well, so people's attention is spread across so many different artists and styles.
I can't speak for conventional rock, a lot of what I listen to is considered alternative/indie rock, and I don't know how to measure greatness, but the music I'm hearing today is for me, much more artistically and emotionally impactful than anything I've heard before.
There is very good 21st century music, which wouldn't have come had it not been for 20th century music.
Thinking igorrr, emergence of gqom (that's very pop for gqom), post rock emerged in the 20th and has a reminiscence of tripped out 70s rock bands, but bands like thee silver mount zion are also very early 21st century.
It's also not surprising we are hitting a barrier after electroacoustic music sort of enlarged the field a lot, the last major innovations were sunths, electronic soundFX and DAWs and these are all 20th century changes. The 20th century saw more innovation than the previous centuries. Fusion of styles, while older, has given interesting merges in the 21st century as well.
But the 20th century will be hard to surpass, pretty much as by the end of the 19th century classical music was running circles.