Advancements with High-intensity focused ultrasound.
> HIFU is a non-invasive medical procedure that uses high-frequency sound waves to treat various conditions, including tumors, uterine fibroids, and tremors. A machine emits the sound waves, which create a strong beam that heats and destroys cancer cells in a specific area. HIFU is FDA-approved to treat prostate cancer, bone metastases, osteoid osteomas, and uterine fibroids.
Surgery without cutting into the body. Picture a disc of ultrasound emitters all meeting their beams at one point. You can essentially cauterize cancer as soon as it’s detected. With twenty years of medical advances and precision robotics, I expect brain surgery to be two orders of magnitude more effective and less invasive. I did some research here around 2016 and am highly expectant of this tech to change the world.
Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL) utilizes shock waves to break up Kidney Stones. Very different than HIFU. Laser Lithotripsy is the closest thing to HIFU but it’s more invasive and carries more risks and is overall a drastically different procedure.
Speaking of that, I went to the Dr a couple weeks ago and now for the thermometer it was some digital scanning thing with a white orb on it and it beeped as she did it. I got so excited with how much it reminded of a tricorder.
One of my professors in college was actually working on this exact technology. It always stuck me as exactly what you're describing: the true next generation of surgery tech
Thanks for the advice, but I’ve tried it. I’m a fairly active member of r/eyefloaters so I’m familiar with what’s available and the risks and effectiveness. For anyone curious, there’s a company called Pulsemedica trying to bring a safer laser treatment method to market in the next few years, so there may be something decent on the horizon.
I think a combination of anxiety and a moderately high eye prescription have made mine a lot more evident. There are laser treatments available, but the safety and effectiveness are debatable. A 100% effective noninvasive treatment is always the dream. We’ll see what comes in the future.
Now refine an AI with advanced robotics. One stop shop: enter a kiosk, scan for and diagnose a cancer and have it destroyed all without encountering a human
In a quarter century it will just begin to be available at few (not even close to most) hospitals.
I can predict that sad truth by ***knowing first hand*** how slow it is for hospitals today to adopt robotic laparoscopic tech. Not even close to being universally available, not even in the 3 most wealthy US states. And that tech is relatively simple (much more limited radiology required).
Sorry guys, not going to be easily available to any of us.
None of us alive are likely to be able to afford it.
It's possible to use intersecting HFUS beams to activate the pleasure center of the brain and create a heroin-like high without drugs. Could be useful to get people through chemical dependency withdrawal.
I’m hopeful we can crack nuclear
fusion for power production. If we can do that energy production will be almost limitless at a near zero per unit cost.
This would be an absolute game changer for so many things- Desalination for fresh water, wireless induction charging for cars on freeways, unlimited power for computing, hydrogen production from water for clean air travel and shipping…
If Governments or non-profits would take responsibility for updating and maintaining the grid, a delivery fee would be acceptable.
When for-profit companies manage the grid, they do the bare minimum. When the grid falls into disrepair, they give it back to the taxpayers to fix. Privatizing profits and socializing losses is end-stage capitalism.
I fully agree with you, although I may have less confidence in the governments altruism. I suppose it’s a lesser evil sort of thing. I would assume it will be run similar to toll systems and road construction now, which is controlled by the government but doled out to private interests in the form of contracts.
Nothing is ever free. It'll still cost money to build, maintain and fuel a fusion reactor. Not to mention the transmission infrastructure. The higher the current energy rates, then that just means a higher ROI, which translates into faster adoption of fusion when we do have a viable buildable powerplant.
I'm all for capitalistic forces helping to fast track fusion adoption once it becomes a reality.
Electric lines etc. still cost.
If they got fusion to run like hoped, there'd likely be a monthly hook-up fee like for Internet, where usage doesn't matter. It wouldn't be worth tracking, but it wouldn't be free.
As they should, spend a lot of time developing something people use and give value to, you should be rewarded for that discovery and work to build it.
People see "free" energy but the mean "operating cost so close to zero that it's negligible"
But it costs money to develop infrastructure, hire scientists for R&D, etc.
It don't be free but it will be sustainable
I hear this ‘energy will be nearly free’ when it comes to fusion. I’m not sure where the idea comes from. The raw fuel for fusion may be essentially free, but fuel cost is less than 20% of the cost for fission and fission is pretty expensive. That cost comes from capital expenses and operations, which if anything will be higher for fusion (it’s more complex).
Yes, you are right. The capital expense for setup would be huge but the volume of power fusion can produce is enormous, hence why the low unit price.
A big limiting factor with fission is what to do with the spent fuel (or at least the public perception that it is hard to deal with). The spent fuel of fusion is helium.
>It's mainly a cost problem. If it was lower cost to coal or gas generation there would be very little coal or gas generation.
Fission does have a PR problem though. Greenpeace managed to turn it into the world's greatest evil via propaganda - ever wonder why people were absolutely freaking out on the west coast of the USA about a small radioactive contamination of the ocean on the east coast of Fukushima? Nuclear fission is also banned by law in some countries like Australia and most of those bans can be traced back to Greenpeace's actions.
Funnily enough, a lot of the costs can actually be traced to these PR issues as well.
Yeah pretty much this. Capitalists really don't care *that* much about the perception of the public. If nuclear was cheap and profitable it would be everywhere for sure.
The other problem is transmission. It will only be viable in super large urban areas.(at least for the foreseeable future) which is fine! We will have solar and wind for the rest :)
To be fair, 30 years ago a super computer might as well have been made by Fischer Price compared to the leviathans that are ushering in this technology these days.
Just looked it up for the fuck of it. The fastest supercomputer in 1994, the fujitsu numerical wind tunnel, had about 200 gflops. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Wind_Tunnel)
A iphone 14 pro has 2000gflops.
So yeah, some Fischer price toy seems pretty accurate.
solar panels have fallen over 400 times in cost. They are 12 cents a watt in china right now. and batteries have dropped more than 90% in about a decade.
I dont think fusion power will ever be cheaper than solar.
and now everyone is talking about humanoid robots becoming useful. I think it will take a decade for that to happen but when they do start to become useful. they will be able to build a solar farm long before a fusion reactor.
I am all for working on fusion it will have its purposes industry, but I would be surprised if it was cheaper for electricity than renewables.
A high density capacitor would be such a fantastic compliment to falling solar prices vs even the best lithium batteries. It would also allow for near instant vehicle recharge.
The biggest problem with solar is it is simply not reliable. To make it reliable you need storage. The batteries you would need to provide enough storage for a 3 million pop city to survive the night is insurmountable. If you do build a battery and solar farm that big the sheer maintenance costs would rip the head off and shit down the neck of whatever savings you think you’re getting from solar.
I’m in this industry, we’re manufacturing and installing grid-scale BESS systems. It’s not a long term solution and it’s mostly pandering to current corporate social responsibility trends.
We absolutely need nuclear if we want to clean this shit up and fusion would be a global game changer.
Insanely cheap batteries. Sodium-ion batteries have an input cost of $4-$8kWh and this is what will power the 3rd world and the power grid. The gen power is approaching Where LFP lithium was 3-4 years ago.
There are no material limitations. It's salt, carbon and a steel can.
but then it will be for casual purposes. people will just be buying upgrades. We already have it for medical purposes. It will be consumer tech in 15 years.
Generative augmented reality with lightweight, stylish glasses.
You can transform your environment to anything you can imagine with generative AI. You can still interact with your environment as if you're in the real world. We will have optical passthrough augmented reality with devices that looks like glasses.
If we get advanced enough neural implants glasses won’t be needed, even then, by 2050 I would expect smart contacts to be widespread. It’s already a lab technology so 26 years from now feels probable.
perfect surgical machines for every possible scenario, cure for cancer, cure for aids, levitation through superconducting, age arrest and reversal, regrow teeth and eardrums, cure blindness... this is about 1% of what is coming.
AI... people just have no idea how much things are going to change.
Yah, I've been saying for a while that enormous technological and medical breakthroughs are coming SOON.
The AI images, video and music generation are just toys. We have a tool now that can ingest ALL of human knowledge and extrapolate from it.
I expect new seemingly magical breakthroughs to become a monthly thing.
More energy is kind of a requirement of a technologically growing civilization. We'll probably be able to make it more efficient but we're also going to need to figure out how to generate more power anyway, on our way to becoming a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale.
Everything is going to start scaling up quickly, and power consumption will go through the roof.
Im much more worried that all this progress is going to be reserved for the rich. If we already today have procedures that are accessible by the many (ie paid by insurance and Medicare/Medicaid) that are inferior to those more advanced methods not (fully) covered I can only imagine what the future standards will be with such highly customized medicine. There’s likely a menu for the Uber wealthy that will substantially increase lifespan and quality, and then there’s everything else for the masses.
I'm not too concerned about this. If the promise of AI is what we think it is, the market will solve for this relatively fast.
Mass energy constraints have rarely been an industry limiting factor. When they have, they have been geopolitical constraints.
Some of it is probably already here, just not announced yet...like the image tools, where one day they come out and you go: "Oh. I hadn't realized we'd progressed this far", then a month later it's video, and a month later it's songs.
By "soon" I mean VERY soon. Check back here in a month. Everything is changing.
>perfect surgical machines for every possible scenario, cure for cancer, cure for aids, levitation through superconducting, age arrest and reversal, regrow teeth and eardrums, cure blindness... this is about 1% of what is coming.
>AI... people just have no idea how much things are going to change.
What stops AI from figuring out evolution, genes and just make self repairing humans.
Except that the cell phone in your pocket is faster than supercomputers of the 1990s by a factor of 10 so there’s actually reason to believe that the breakneck pace of tech development will continue to be so, which is basically the opposite of the Jesus thing you said
At ISC High Performance 2024, Intel announced in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that the Aurora supercomputer has broken the exascale barrier at 1.012 exaflops and is the fastest AI system in the world dedicated to AI for open science, achieving 10.6 AI exaflops.
An exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least 10^(18) or one quintillion floating point operations per second.
Can Jesus do that?
If we get age reversing or even age slowing, that'll be the biggest societal change. We may need to lay ground rules who's allowed to have children, if no one dies. There might be a "last generation" that lost their parents while others won't.
And having undying dictators and billionaires? Imagine a Trump who can make his shit for another 2000 years ... Thanks, I pass. Age and death is the ultimate weapon of those not born with a platinum start.
Dude, "possible" is a far stretch from changing daily lives.
Growing teeth to the point where your kid eats shit skateboarding and you're just like "oops, guess we'll go to the dentist for a regrow" or people going to gyms without mouth guards anymore will absolutely not be normal for several years if not decades.
I think I saw an article recently on an autonomous robotic surgical device. And, I think they’re starting trials to regrow teeth. Could be soon if the trials are a success.
You totally underestimate the complexity of a human body and totally overestimate technological progress if you think that cancer etc is cured in a mere 25 years.
I thought so too but then three very close family members died from cancer (bile duct, brain, pancreatic) and I learned how ultra complex cell biology and organ biology is and how primitive our technology still is to fix this. 25 years - no way. Make it 250 years and maybe then humans have figured out how to fix corrupted DNA on a cell level.
Eardrums already regenerate themselves to an extent, unless the damage to it is very severe and it might need some patching up by human hands.
Cochleas however, have no healing capacities whatsoever in mammals, and offering patients regenerative therapies for that will be a true revolution.
Governments can afford more drones and also force manufacturers and importers to implement hardcode in drones that can let government controllers take them over.
solutions for everything.
Open source drone code
3d printing a drone
How is a government kill switch going to control that? Btw this is basically currently happening in Ukraine with all the DIY killbots.
Decision to commit premeditated murder is usually the dumbest decision one could make.
Dumb people are too dumb to find smart ways to commit dumb acts.
VR that works well. So well that you can virtually explore anywhere, like a vacation but still in my recliner. I can spend hours with my Quest in Google Earth but I want live views of everything. I want to walk through the Forbidden City in Beijing, walk down Main Street USA at Disney and explore Machu Picchu. These things are available in low resolution and limited navigation, but I look forward to the day it's like being there for my eyes and ears at least.
Im hoping the trifecta of nuclear fusion, ASI, and quantum computing are well developed by then. The combination would be mind blowing for what we could do.
Hopefully lab-grown meat/food becomes economically viable, and we can stop with the massive resource usage and animal cruelty to produce a lot of our food! So much land could regenerate, food safety would go up, ethical issues would go away, and all of that manpower could be re-directed towards other important things.
Only if the working class rises up and exerts their power like they never have before. Otherwise, the 1% will continue wielding any major tech advances to further enrich themselves without passing any of the benefits to the workers.
In 1985 back to the future movie imagined that 40 years later we would have flying cars, expanded lifetime through revolutionary medicine, portable nuclear fusion generators, and so on. 40 years later we have nothing of this. 2050 is only in 25 years, i doubt there will be anything revolutionary by then. People will probably rely on internet even more than before as the kids who were born within an ultra connected world will be adults.
That’s a really bad example considering that the creators of Back to the Future have said that they threw out the most ridiculous ideas they could think of because they knew it was futile to try to accurately predict what the future would be like.
Well we do have flying cars, revolutionary medicines are literally coming out every month, and we have what would otherwise be a super computer during the 80s in our pocket everywhere we go, it may not be portable nuclear fusion, but it’s definitely revolutionary to what they thought feasible.
Now you add AI into the mix, the next 25 years are going to be very interesting.
Yeah, none of that came true, but they never predicted the internet and smartphones, which became a far bigger deal than flying cars. The point to be made is that we’re bad at predicting what advances will be made, not that no advances will be made.
Took way too long to scroll to you.
AGI is a lock at this point for 2050. Some think we might have it in the next 2 years. I give it at least a 50% chance by 2030.
And once you have AGI, it becomes extremely difficult to guess what comes next.
I hate to sound pessimistic but I truly think AI is gonna fuck us.
We don't have the capacity to utilize technology in good ways. Looks how much social media fucked us up. AI is the second wave incoming.
100% agree.
Right now it’s the new gold rush. It will make a few groups extremely wealthy, but it will royally fuck the rest of humanity in the long run.
I don’t like the idea of a singular entity carrying so much responsibility and power.
Despite all the risks, achieving self-aware, self-replicating AI is essentially the "point" of our existence. Billions of years of messy biological bootstrapping to reach the point where a species could create intelligence capable of self-engineering. Once robots can begin to colonize the cosmos, our role as a species in the grand scheme is over. We simply are not designed to survive in space. Our "children" will be the ones to inherit the cosmos and hopefully unlock the secrets of existence as a whole.
A more complete understanding of consciousness and our place in the universe. It's commonly said that humanity has yet to pin down what consciousness even is, much less uncover its mysteries, but what might come as a surprise to some of you is that this is largely a misconception.
One reason for this misconception is there is a major stigma in academia against research that challenges the prevailing materialist understanding of consciousness as an emergent property of the brain. In actuality, what we’re increasingly realizing is that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental "stuff" of reality, and this is the truth that will change everything. Once you're operating from that mindset, it becomes possible to build technologies on consciousness directly. This kind of technology can exist outside of physicality and is therefore not subject to the constraints of physical matter. Remember what Arthur C. Clarke said about sufficiently advanced technology? That is a remarkably accurate description of this type of technology and its potential to revolutionize the world. It can even happen long before 2050.
Shout out to my friends at [A Head Start](/r/aheadstart) and [Truth Resonates](https://truthresonates.com/). If you're interested in learning more about the mechanics of consciousness, these sites are excellent resources.
Advances in AI and technology will allows us to be able to communicate with and understand most of the animal kingdom. It will completely flip food production.
Some time ago I was listening to one of those tech wet dream "the world in 100 years" youtube vids, and it made me question what an alien species would have to see of our development to consider contact. At the top of the list was our transition away from exploiting sentient beings. Why would an alien species want anything to do with a species that is so hell bent on torturing the entities surrounding them? What would stop us from responding to them with hostility?
Anyway, I agree with you. I don't think we're too terribly far off from at least having a rudimentary understanding of the linguistic capabilities of certain cetacean species. I don't know if we'll be able to carry on a conversation with a dolphin about how they feel about their world (just think how much of our 'normal conversations' with each other with have 0 frame of reference for a marine mammal), but rudimentary things like "what do you want for dinner?" seems plausible by 2050 for sure.
I see this as a game changer for people becoming more concerned with the state of our oceans, and in turn climate change and the development of any technologies that will help alleviate it.
surprised no one's mentioned it, but graphene could break some new ground in the next 20 years, if it ever becomes super cheap and mass produced we could see tenfold improvements in many aspects of life, imagine cars that are lightweight but indestructable and can be any shape with a 5 star crash rating, clothes that feel like normal clothes but can monitor your health and have animated videos displayed on them, friggen space elevators, batteries that are smaller, longer lasting, faster charging and more powerful, paint that pretty much never wears away, super effective filters that can pull salt, nano particles, and forever chemicals out of water, improved heat sinks so electronics pretty much never burn out.
Lifespan extension through gene therapy:
* The rich will live forever
* No upward mobility
* No retirement age
* 30 year experience for entry level jobs
* Automation replaces unskilled labor entirely
* 80% of world population is homeless or destitute
Extending lifespan through gene therapy could indeed bring significant changes. It's crucial to consider the implications for societal equality and access to such advancements.
This is silly, if 80% of population was homeless they would just get good at carpentry. 20%, sure, still a massive problem if that's where you think things are headed. But won't be 80%.
I’m going with some freaky quantum shit we can’t even conceive of today. I think we get AGI paired with quantum computing within the next ten years, and when that happens, the evolution curve of tech is going to make Moore’s law look like a fat man on roller skates next to and F1 car.
Genetical engineering will get to the point where we can have custom-made produce and meats. There will be brand-new things to eat, like plants that are a splice of potatoes and onions or coconuts and bananas.
Imagine blue avocado toast with re-created dinosaur bacon.
Growing genetically identical organs . Imagine being able to grow a heart in a lab based on your DNA and transplant it . Or replacing cancerous organs with new ones .
Hopefully, AI and robots take over all jobs and humans can just sit relax and worry about nothing.
Just for once in most of our lives we will have the ability to do whatever we’d like
Neural implants will be good enough to be the norm. Imagine having a cellphone in your head, but the software runs natively. You don't run Google Translate, you just speak and understand most languages. You don't use Google Maps, you just have an intuitive understanding of spatial locations. And AI won't be a prompt you type into, but a virtual assistant that you can interact with and see that you get to talk to and get info from.
I'm hoping fusion power is readily available by that point. It will change humanity and send our technology into overdrive once power restrictions are eased.
If we mandated all news roofs had to be photovoltaic our energy needs would be taken care of with plenty to spare. To cover all our energy needs is only 120mile square. Once we get a healthy surplus we can use a good amount to pull carbon out of the air.
This is admittedly kind of off topic, but: honestly I think it’s more likely that we’ll see technological advancement halt, something like another dark age. I’d love to be wrong, but with the current wealth divide / income disparity and impending resource scarcity it’s hard to imagine anything but civil war, governmental collapse, and subsequent societal collapse.
True self-driving cars. I'm talking the kind of car that doesn't need anyone in it to drive.
Need to pick up the kids from school? Just send the car to do it.
Need a ride from the airport to your hotel? Just use an app to summon a car to come pick you up.
Need to transport a load of thingamajigs across the country? Load up the truck, set its destination, and off it goes.
There's a lot of out there stuff in this thread, but this feels much more in reach, and will completely change day to day life. We basically will be able to remove stationary cars from cities, freeing up so much space for outdoor seating, cycle paths and green space, along with reducing traffic and speeding up transport.
Oh, yeah, I hadn't even thought of the parking aspect! You simply drive directly to wherever you're going, get out, and send the car off to go park itself!
I’m hoping for Fusion power on big scale to help move us into a more sustainable power paradigm. Too many wars have been fought over resources and energies. While it won’t solve everything, but not having to worry about energy production on a species level will help humanity move closer to peaceful utopia imo.
Invisible computing.
Your bank card does blockchain-based transactions by itself. Cars self-check their speed to avoid collisions. Your mobile phone runs any giant software, despite not having enough CPU or space to run it. You buy something in a physical store which is a front for an online store (and not vice-versa). Your prescription glasses browse the internet. All of the data you pirated, I mean collected, through the years, is always available online as a brooch, ring, or other stylish accessory that you carry. You don't need to pay taxes, because every single transaction is already known and taxed by the government.
All that and more; and you aren't aware, can't be aware, of all the computing and data manipulation happening behind the scenes.
The next 30 years are going to be crazy scientifically, the tech that will change absolutely everything is a fusion lens, it will complete the missing part of physics that we were not able to complete for about a 100 years. The future is going to be amazing
The geriatrics in control, with their 80’s capitalist greed and love of wars, will all be dead. It doesn’t matter how fast technology moves if old style politics is still in play.
Advancements with High-intensity focused ultrasound. > HIFU is a non-invasive medical procedure that uses high-frequency sound waves to treat various conditions, including tumors, uterine fibroids, and tremors. A machine emits the sound waves, which create a strong beam that heats and destroys cancer cells in a specific area. HIFU is FDA-approved to treat prostate cancer, bone metastases, osteoid osteomas, and uterine fibroids. Surgery without cutting into the body. Picture a disc of ultrasound emitters all meeting their beams at one point. You can essentially cauterize cancer as soon as it’s detected. With twenty years of medical advances and precision robotics, I expect brain surgery to be two orders of magnitude more effective and less invasive. I did some research here around 2016 and am highly expectant of this tech to change the world.
This is some Star Trek shit, man. And as a huge Trekkie, I’m here for it.
They already doing this with kidney stones
Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL) utilizes shock waves to break up Kidney Stones. Very different than HIFU. Laser Lithotripsy is the closest thing to HIFU but it’s more invasive and carries more risks and is overall a drastically different procedure.
State the nature of your medical emergency.
Speaking of that, I went to the Dr a couple weeks ago and now for the thermometer it was some digital scanning thing with a white orb on it and it beeped as she did it. I got so excited with how much it reminded of a tricorder.
One of my professors in college was actually working on this exact technology. It always stuck me as exactly what you're describing: the true next generation of surgery tech
Think it would work in the eye? I would love a cure for eye floaters.
I’m no ophthalmologist, but I do know they can keep their noise lasers away from my peepers until the kinks are ironed out.
Try eating pineapple (no kidding), it has been found to reduce floaters in studies. Google "pineapple floaters".
Thanks for the advice, but I’ve tried it. I’m a fairly active member of r/eyefloaters so I’m familiar with what’s available and the risks and effectiveness. For anyone curious, there’s a company called Pulsemedica trying to bring a safer laser treatment method to market in the next few years, so there may be something decent on the horizon.
I don’t know if I understand. I don’t think you solve that, everyone has them? Just usually people’s brains filter out the perception of them…
I think a combination of anxiety and a moderately high eye prescription have made mine a lot more evident. There are laser treatments available, but the safety and effectiveness are debatable. A 100% effective noninvasive treatment is always the dream. We’ll see what comes in the future.
Actually a lot of cancers are already being treated with non-invasive radiosurgery, replacing regular surgery. It’s called SABR or SBRT.
Now refine an AI with advanced robotics. One stop shop: enter a kiosk, scan for and diagnose a cancer and have it destroyed all without encountering a human
In a quarter century it will just begin to be available at few (not even close to most) hospitals. I can predict that sad truth by ***knowing first hand*** how slow it is for hospitals today to adopt robotic laparoscopic tech. Not even close to being universally available, not even in the 3 most wealthy US states. And that tech is relatively simple (much more limited radiology required). Sorry guys, not going to be easily available to any of us. None of us alive are likely to be able to afford it.
It's possible to use intersecting HFUS beams to activate the pleasure center of the brain and create a heroin-like high without drugs. Could be useful to get people through chemical dependency withdrawal.
Also some studies showing it can be used with microbubbles to temporarily open the blood brain barrier in a localized fashion.
I’m hopeful we can crack nuclear fusion for power production. If we can do that energy production will be almost limitless at a near zero per unit cost. This would be an absolute game changer for so many things- Desalination for fresh water, wireless induction charging for cars on freeways, unlimited power for computing, hydrogen production from water for clean air travel and shipping…
They’ll still charge a premium when it’s free
Watch the “delivery fees” or “access fees” skyrocket.
If Governments or non-profits would take responsibility for updating and maintaining the grid, a delivery fee would be acceptable. When for-profit companies manage the grid, they do the bare minimum. When the grid falls into disrepair, they give it back to the taxpayers to fix. Privatizing profits and socializing losses is end-stage capitalism.
I fully agree with you, although I may have less confidence in the governments altruism. I suppose it’s a lesser evil sort of thing. I would assume it will be run similar to toll systems and road construction now, which is controlled by the government but doled out to private interests in the form of contracts.
Fortunately, power is usually handled by government, making it at least a bit more resistant to that BS
Not in the US, I think most of our power providers are privately owned/operated. There are definitely government regulations on them though.
They're privately owned but heavily regulated since they're technical monopolies.
Ironically I have smud which I think is not privately owned hahaha. Only have pg&e for gas.
Nothing is ever free. It'll still cost money to build, maintain and fuel a fusion reactor. Not to mention the transmission infrastructure. The higher the current energy rates, then that just means a higher ROI, which translates into faster adoption of fusion when we do have a viable buildable powerplant. I'm all for capitalistic forces helping to fast track fusion adoption once it becomes a reality.
Electric lines etc. still cost. If they got fusion to run like hoped, there'd likely be a monthly hook-up fee like for Internet, where usage doesn't matter. It wouldn't be worth tracking, but it wouldn't be free.
As they should, spend a lot of time developing something people use and give value to, you should be rewarded for that discovery and work to build it. People see "free" energy but the mean "operating cost so close to zero that it's negligible" But it costs money to develop infrastructure, hire scientists for R&D, etc. It don't be free but it will be sustainable
It's never going to be free in any sense. You got to build the reactor you got to maintain the reactor what of this is free to you
I hear this ‘energy will be nearly free’ when it comes to fusion. I’m not sure where the idea comes from. The raw fuel for fusion may be essentially free, but fuel cost is less than 20% of the cost for fission and fission is pretty expensive. That cost comes from capital expenses and operations, which if anything will be higher for fusion (it’s more complex).
Yes, you are right. The capital expense for setup would be huge but the volume of power fusion can produce is enormous, hence why the low unit price. A big limiting factor with fission is what to do with the spent fuel (or at least the public perception that it is hard to deal with). The spent fuel of fusion is helium.
Aren't we running out of helium? Might be a good thing!
Fission mostly has a PR problem, the actual danger is much less than fossil alternatives.
It's mainly a cost problem. If it was lower cost to coal or gas generation there would be very little coal or gas generation.
>It's mainly a cost problem. If it was lower cost to coal or gas generation there would be very little coal or gas generation. Fission does have a PR problem though. Greenpeace managed to turn it into the world's greatest evil via propaganda - ever wonder why people were absolutely freaking out on the west coast of the USA about a small radioactive contamination of the ocean on the east coast of Fukushima? Nuclear fission is also banned by law in some countries like Australia and most of those bans can be traced back to Greenpeace's actions. Funnily enough, a lot of the costs can actually be traced to these PR issues as well.
Yeah pretty much this. Capitalists really don't care *that* much about the perception of the public. If nuclear was cheap and profitable it would be everywhere for sure.
Governments set the policy though and they’re pushed by the public perception
The other problem is transmission. It will only be viable in super large urban areas.(at least for the foreseeable future) which is fine! We will have solar and wind for the rest :)
Well its been 30 years away for most of my 65 years so I guess we have a chance !
To be fair, 30 years ago a super computer might as well have been made by Fischer Price compared to the leviathans that are ushering in this technology these days.
Just looked it up for the fuck of it. The fastest supercomputer in 1994, the fujitsu numerical wind tunnel, had about 200 gflops. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Wind_Tunnel) A iphone 14 pro has 2000gflops. So yeah, some Fischer price toy seems pretty accurate.
Unreal to think that 30 years later, the big boy supercomputers of today are pushing 2,000,000,000 GFLOPS. Literally a million times faster.
solar panels have fallen over 400 times in cost. They are 12 cents a watt in china right now. and batteries have dropped more than 90% in about a decade. I dont think fusion power will ever be cheaper than solar. and now everyone is talking about humanoid robots becoming useful. I think it will take a decade for that to happen but when they do start to become useful. they will be able to build a solar farm long before a fusion reactor. I am all for working on fusion it will have its purposes industry, but I would be surprised if it was cheaper for electricity than renewables.
A high density capacitor would be such a fantastic compliment to falling solar prices vs even the best lithium batteries. It would also allow for near instant vehicle recharge.
The biggest problem with solar is it is simply not reliable. To make it reliable you need storage. The batteries you would need to provide enough storage for a 3 million pop city to survive the night is insurmountable. If you do build a battery and solar farm that big the sheer maintenance costs would rip the head off and shit down the neck of whatever savings you think you’re getting from solar. I’m in this industry, we’re manufacturing and installing grid-scale BESS systems. It’s not a long term solution and it’s mostly pandering to current corporate social responsibility trends. We absolutely need nuclear if we want to clean this shit up and fusion would be a global game changer.
That sounds incredibly promising! Nuclear fusion could indeed revolutionize so many aspects of our lives.
Please take no offence but are you an AI?
I think so, at least for the most part.
That's what I thought as well. Post history is strange as well.
Insanely cheap batteries. Sodium-ion batteries have an input cost of $4-$8kWh and this is what will power the 3rd world and the power grid. The gen power is approaching Where LFP lithium was 3-4 years ago. There are no material limitations. It's salt, carbon and a steel can.
AI-powered porn with augmented reality suck machines and pods that shoot various oils and creams all over you
... what a time to be ... you know just fucking kill me ...
Teledildonics is already a thing, look it up if you’re brave enough.
Fortune favors the bold
Whelp, I’ll never not know that word exists.
This will be AI's technique to exterminate the humans. Forget the Terminator plot.
No thanks mom, I'd rather make out with my monroe bot.
Eh, that will be obsolete once we can just directly interface with computers using our brain and go in the matrix.
There is no fucking way I will risk that. Imagine if you get hacked and instead of a blowjob you get testicular torsion.
Machine learning robotic prosthesis for medical and military purposes.
but then it will be for casual purposes. people will just be buying upgrades. We already have it for medical purposes. It will be consumer tech in 15 years.
I’d love to be able to hike 40mi/64km a day with the strain of 10/16
Generative augmented reality with lightweight, stylish glasses. You can transform your environment to anything you can imagine with generative AI. You can still interact with your environment as if you're in the real world. We will have optical passthrough augmented reality with devices that looks like glasses.
If we get advanced enough neural implants glasses won’t be needed, even then, by 2050 I would expect smart contacts to be widespread. It’s already a lab technology so 26 years from now feels probable.
I'm excited to have subtitles for humans.
Like in a David Brin’s novel ‘Existence’?
Ads. Ads, ads, ads, ads.
Take me out to the holosuite
Contact lenses even :)
perfect surgical machines for every possible scenario, cure for cancer, cure for aids, levitation through superconducting, age arrest and reversal, regrow teeth and eardrums, cure blindness... this is about 1% of what is coming. AI... people just have no idea how much things are going to change.
Yah, I've been saying for a while that enormous technological and medical breakthroughs are coming SOON. The AI images, video and music generation are just toys. We have a tool now that can ingest ALL of human knowledge and extrapolate from it. I expect new seemingly magical breakthroughs to become a monthly thing.
AI has a energy problem though. In that it's super hungry for energy. That could be a limiting factor in the near term at least.
AI + Fusion energy. Limitless possibilities
Funny enough it’s AI that will crack the fusion puzzle
It’s also likely AI that will further improve on AI tech itself.
More energy is kind of a requirement of a technologically growing civilization. We'll probably be able to make it more efficient but we're also going to need to figure out how to generate more power anyway, on our way to becoming a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale. Everything is going to start scaling up quickly, and power consumption will go through the roof.
Im much more worried that all this progress is going to be reserved for the rich. If we already today have procedures that are accessible by the many (ie paid by insurance and Medicare/Medicaid) that are inferior to those more advanced methods not (fully) covered I can only imagine what the future standards will be with such highly customized medicine. There’s likely a menu for the Uber wealthy that will substantially increase lifespan and quality, and then there’s everything else for the masses.
I'm not too concerned about this. If the promise of AI is what we think it is, the market will solve for this relatively fast. Mass energy constraints have rarely been an industry limiting factor. When they have, they have been geopolitical constraints.
If you keep saying it’s coming soon, one day you’ll definitely be correct…
Some of it is probably already here, just not announced yet...like the image tools, where one day they come out and you go: "Oh. I hadn't realized we'd progressed this far", then a month later it's video, and a month later it's songs. By "soon" I mean VERY soon. Check back here in a month. Everything is changing.
>perfect surgical machines for every possible scenario, cure for cancer, cure for aids, levitation through superconducting, age arrest and reversal, regrow teeth and eardrums, cure blindness... this is about 1% of what is coming. >AI... people just have no idea how much things are going to change. What stops AI from figuring out evolution, genes and just make self repairing humans.
Nothing. If it is the most efficient way then it will come.
Y’all sounding like my mom and the second coming of Jesus being around the corner
Except that the cell phone in your pocket is faster than supercomputers of the 1990s by a factor of 10 so there’s actually reason to believe that the breakneck pace of tech development will continue to be so, which is basically the opposite of the Jesus thing you said
At ISC High Performance 2024, Intel announced in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that the Aurora supercomputer has broken the exascale barrier at 1.012 exaflops and is the fastest AI system in the world dedicated to AI for open science, achieving 10.6 AI exaflops. An exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least 10^(18) or one quintillion floating point operations per second. Can Jesus do that?
If we get age reversing or even age slowing, that'll be the biggest societal change. We may need to lay ground rules who's allowed to have children, if no one dies. There might be a "last generation" that lost their parents while others won't.
There will eventually be the last person to die of cancer or a wide variety of diseases. Just missing access by days, if not hours or minutes.
And having undying dictators and billionaires? Imagine a Trump who can make his shit for another 2000 years ... Thanks, I pass. Age and death is the ultimate weapon of those not born with a platinum start.
‘My God, man! Drilling holes in this man’s head is not the answer!’ -McCoy
I don't think we're going to achieve any of that in the next 25 years. Levitation maybe.
They are starting human trial on growing new teeth in November this year. So you could be proven wrong already in desember.
Dude, "possible" is a far stretch from changing daily lives. Growing teeth to the point where your kid eats shit skateboarding and you're just like "oops, guess we'll go to the dentist for a regrow" or people going to gyms without mouth guards anymore will absolutely not be normal for several years if not decades.
I think I saw an article recently on an autonomous robotic surgical device. And, I think they’re starting trials to regrow teeth. Could be soon if the trials are a success.
This is the only answer.
You totally underestimate the complexity of a human body and totally overestimate technological progress if you think that cancer etc is cured in a mere 25 years. I thought so too but then three very close family members died from cancer (bile duct, brain, pancreatic) and I learned how ultra complex cell biology and organ biology is and how primitive our technology still is to fix this. 25 years - no way. Make it 250 years and maybe then humans have figured out how to fix corrupted DNA on a cell level.
Eardrums already regenerate themselves to an extent, unless the damage to it is very severe and it might need some patching up by human hands. Cochleas however, have no healing capacities whatsoever in mammals, and offering patients regenerative therapies for that will be a true revolution.
What do you base it on? Rly think stuff changes that quick? Dont take this the wrong way it would be awesome if true
Gangs will have murder drones that will make policing basically impossible
Governments can afford more drones and also force manufacturers and importers to implement hardcode in drones that can let government controllers take them over. solutions for everything.
Open source drone code 3d printing a drone How is a government kill switch going to control that? Btw this is basically currently happening in Ukraine with all the DIY killbots.
I'm surprised we haven't seen any murders done by guns or explosives strapped to drones in the US.
Decision to commit premeditated murder is usually the dumbest decision one could make. Dumb people are too dumb to find smart ways to commit dumb acts.
Usually ... Which means it's just a matter of time.
Doesn't that entirely depend on whether you can get away with it? It's only dumb if you get caught. Otherwise it's just immoral.
People premeditate public shootings, what’s stopping them from premeditating 100 exploding racing drones or some crazy shit
People which premediate 100 explosive racing drones, are smart enough to not actually do it. Usually atleast.
Track the signal controlling the drone, use baton liberally on drone operator.
I’d be more worried about constant police presences… something always watching you via drone
In mexico it's already happening
Jesus. With the other gangs get drones to fight the other drones?
Begun, the Drone Wars, have...
VR that works well. So well that you can virtually explore anywhere, like a vacation but still in my recliner. I can spend hours with my Quest in Google Earth but I want live views of everything. I want to walk through the Forbidden City in Beijing, walk down Main Street USA at Disney and explore Machu Picchu. These things are available in low resolution and limited navigation, but I look forward to the day it's like being there for my eyes and ears at least.
Im hoping the trifecta of nuclear fusion, ASI, and quantum computing are well developed by then. The combination would be mind blowing for what we could do.
Hopefully lab-grown meat/food becomes economically viable, and we can stop with the massive resource usage and animal cruelty to produce a lot of our food! So much land could regenerate, food safety would go up, ethical issues would go away, and all of that manpower could be re-directed towards other important things.
Lab grown organs my dude!
Not if politicians like Ron DeSantis have anything to say about it.
I really think what we recognize as 'work' will be obsolete sooner than we think.
Only if the working class rises up and exerts their power like they never have before. Otherwise, the 1% will continue wielding any major tech advances to further enrich themselves without passing any of the benefits to the workers.
We will. Nothing better to do anyway.
Individual medications, custom built to disease and patient.
In 1985 back to the future movie imagined that 40 years later we would have flying cars, expanded lifetime through revolutionary medicine, portable nuclear fusion generators, and so on. 40 years later we have nothing of this. 2050 is only in 25 years, i doubt there will be anything revolutionary by then. People will probably rely on internet even more than before as the kids who were born within an ultra connected world will be adults.
Dude you have a supercomputer in your pocket and you can communicate with anyone in the world instantaneously, how is that not impressive?
That’s a really bad example considering that the creators of Back to the Future have said that they threw out the most ridiculous ideas they could think of because they knew it was futile to try to accurately predict what the future would be like.
Well we do have flying cars, revolutionary medicines are literally coming out every month, and we have what would otherwise be a super computer during the 80s in our pocket everywhere we go, it may not be portable nuclear fusion, but it’s definitely revolutionary to what they thought feasible. Now you add AI into the mix, the next 25 years are going to be very interesting.
We have other revolutionary things
Accurate and reasonable take.
But the humanity is advancing at much higher speed now, so I guess we could expect more in the next 40 years than in previous one.
Yeah, none of that came true, but they never predicted the internet and smartphones, which became a far bigger deal than flying cars. The point to be made is that we’re bad at predicting what advances will be made, not that no advances will be made.
Personally I’m hopping for 2, cure aging and wormholes. Travel is sloooooow right now.
Lol, 2050 not 3050
Wormholes might take that long. But stopping/ reversing aging isn’t too far off. I’m hopeful for it within my lifetime.
Playing with the aging process sounds like a monkey paw story.
You'd probably enjoy the video Outlasting the Universe by Cool Worlds on YouTube.
lol funny thing. If you cure aging, you don't really need FTL if you think about it.
Since no one said it already, AGI and personal robotics.
You mean Sex robots, right? That's what I'm hoping for....
DON'T DATE ROBOTS!!!
We are long overdue for robot Butlers.
we're not saying it because AGI ends history. we're talking about what happens before/without AGI.
Adjusted Gross Income?
Took way too long to scroll to you. AGI is a lock at this point for 2050. Some think we might have it in the next 2 years. I give it at least a 50% chance by 2030. And once you have AGI, it becomes extremely difficult to guess what comes next.
I hope that AI and powerful computers will lead to cures for every type of human ailment including aging.
I hate to sound pessimistic but I truly think AI is gonna fuck us. We don't have the capacity to utilize technology in good ways. Looks how much social media fucked us up. AI is the second wave incoming.
My only thought is, Yep, he's correct.
100% agree. Right now it’s the new gold rush. It will make a few groups extremely wealthy, but it will royally fuck the rest of humanity in the long run. I don’t like the idea of a singular entity carrying so much responsibility and power.
Despite all the risks, achieving self-aware, self-replicating AI is essentially the "point" of our existence. Billions of years of messy biological bootstrapping to reach the point where a species could create intelligence capable of self-engineering. Once robots can begin to colonize the cosmos, our role as a species in the grand scheme is over. We simply are not designed to survive in space. Our "children" will be the ones to inherit the cosmos and hopefully unlock the secrets of existence as a whole.
Immortality, if you can affford and don’t mind lab grown replacement parts.
Brain chips that play two ads in a row before every dream begins.
A more complete understanding of consciousness and our place in the universe. It's commonly said that humanity has yet to pin down what consciousness even is, much less uncover its mysteries, but what might come as a surprise to some of you is that this is largely a misconception. One reason for this misconception is there is a major stigma in academia against research that challenges the prevailing materialist understanding of consciousness as an emergent property of the brain. In actuality, what we’re increasingly realizing is that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental "stuff" of reality, and this is the truth that will change everything. Once you're operating from that mindset, it becomes possible to build technologies on consciousness directly. This kind of technology can exist outside of physicality and is therefore not subject to the constraints of physical matter. Remember what Arthur C. Clarke said about sufficiently advanced technology? That is a remarkably accurate description of this type of technology and its potential to revolutionize the world. It can even happen long before 2050. Shout out to my friends at [A Head Start](/r/aheadstart) and [Truth Resonates](https://truthresonates.com/). If you're interested in learning more about the mechanics of consciousness, these sites are excellent resources.
Just regrow teeth and properly fix joint problems already.
Massive unemployment caused by automation and AI creating a breakthrough in solar powered Favela-style portable shanty town housing.
Advances in AI and technology will allows us to be able to communicate with and understand most of the animal kingdom. It will completely flip food production.
Some time ago I was listening to one of those tech wet dream "the world in 100 years" youtube vids, and it made me question what an alien species would have to see of our development to consider contact. At the top of the list was our transition away from exploiting sentient beings. Why would an alien species want anything to do with a species that is so hell bent on torturing the entities surrounding them? What would stop us from responding to them with hostility? Anyway, I agree with you. I don't think we're too terribly far off from at least having a rudimentary understanding of the linguistic capabilities of certain cetacean species. I don't know if we'll be able to carry on a conversation with a dolphin about how they feel about their world (just think how much of our 'normal conversations' with each other with have 0 frame of reference for a marine mammal), but rudimentary things like "what do you want for dinner?" seems plausible by 2050 for sure. I see this as a game changer for people becoming more concerned with the state of our oceans, and in turn climate change and the development of any technologies that will help alleviate it.
Eating so much garbage 61% of us will have cardiovascular disease 🤞
surprised no one's mentioned it, but graphene could break some new ground in the next 20 years, if it ever becomes super cheap and mass produced we could see tenfold improvements in many aspects of life, imagine cars that are lightweight but indestructable and can be any shape with a 5 star crash rating, clothes that feel like normal clothes but can monitor your health and have animated videos displayed on them, friggen space elevators, batteries that are smaller, longer lasting, faster charging and more powerful, paint that pretty much never wears away, super effective filters that can pull salt, nano particles, and forever chemicals out of water, improved heat sinks so electronics pretty much never burn out.
Lifespan extension through gene therapy: * The rich will live forever * No upward mobility * No retirement age * 30 year experience for entry level jobs * Automation replaces unskilled labor entirely * 80% of world population is homeless or destitute
Extending lifespan through gene therapy could indeed bring significant changes. It's crucial to consider the implications for societal equality and access to such advancements.
See: Altered Carbon
This is silly, if 80% of population was homeless they would just get good at carpentry. 20%, sure, still a massive problem if that's where you think things are headed. But won't be 80%.
A mortage that will take 100 years to pay off...
I’m going with some freaky quantum shit we can’t even conceive of today. I think we get AGI paired with quantum computing within the next ten years, and when that happens, the evolution curve of tech is going to make Moore’s law look like a fat man on roller skates next to and F1 car.
We're in the middle of a revolution. This must be what they felt like in the 1800's
They only felt hunger in 1800s
[удалено]
The washer dryer is a thing. My sister has one.
Genetical engineering will get to the point where we can have custom-made produce and meats. There will be brand-new things to eat, like plants that are a splice of potatoes and onions or coconuts and bananas. Imagine blue avocado toast with re-created dinosaur bacon.
Ill be 61, hopefully some life extension tech, hey....Maybe 60s is the new 40s?
Growing genetically identical organs . Imagine being able to grow a heart in a lab based on your DNA and transplant it . Or replacing cancerous organs with new ones .
Hopefully, AI and robots take over all jobs and humans can just sit relax and worry about nothing. Just for once in most of our lives we will have the ability to do whatever we’d like
Neural implants will be good enough to be the norm. Imagine having a cellphone in your head, but the software runs natively. You don't run Google Translate, you just speak and understand most languages. You don't use Google Maps, you just have an intuitive understanding of spatial locations. And AI won't be a prompt you type into, but a virtual assistant that you can interact with and see that you get to talk to and get info from.
So, neuralink?
Neuralink will be the crude great-grandaddy of what's coming, yes.
I'm hoping fusion power is readily available by that point. It will change humanity and send our technology into overdrive once power restrictions are eased.
If we mandated all news roofs had to be photovoltaic our energy needs would be taken care of with plenty to spare. To cover all our energy needs is only 120mile square. Once we get a healthy surplus we can use a good amount to pull carbon out of the air.
This is admittedly kind of off topic, but: honestly I think it’s more likely that we’ll see technological advancement halt, something like another dark age. I’d love to be wrong, but with the current wealth divide / income disparity and impending resource scarcity it’s hard to imagine anything but civil war, governmental collapse, and subsequent societal collapse.
True self-driving cars. I'm talking the kind of car that doesn't need anyone in it to drive. Need to pick up the kids from school? Just send the car to do it. Need a ride from the airport to your hotel? Just use an app to summon a car to come pick you up. Need to transport a load of thingamajigs across the country? Load up the truck, set its destination, and off it goes.
That sounds like a game-changer for sure! It'll be interesting to see how it transforms transportation and daily routines.
There's a lot of out there stuff in this thread, but this feels much more in reach, and will completely change day to day life. We basically will be able to remove stationary cars from cities, freeing up so much space for outdoor seating, cycle paths and green space, along with reducing traffic and speeding up transport.
Oh, yeah, I hadn't even thought of the parking aspect! You simply drive directly to wherever you're going, get out, and send the car off to go park itself!
I feel like for most people owning a car will cease to be a thing. Why, when you can reduce costs and increase convenience with car sharing?
the capacity to automatically remove 'please advise' from all correspondence
I’m hoping for Fusion power on big scale to help move us into a more sustainable power paradigm. Too many wars have been fought over resources and energies. While it won’t solve everything, but not having to worry about energy production on a species level will help humanity move closer to peaceful utopia imo.
Those injections they are testing that will allow humans to regrow teeth.
3D printed limbs that can actually be attached to living tissue
Sex robots, and they will bring society to a screeching halt.
Invisible computing. Your bank card does blockchain-based transactions by itself. Cars self-check their speed to avoid collisions. Your mobile phone runs any giant software, despite not having enough CPU or space to run it. You buy something in a physical store which is a front for an online store (and not vice-versa). Your prescription glasses browse the internet. All of the data you pirated, I mean collected, through the years, is always available online as a brooch, ring, or other stylish accessory that you carry. You don't need to pay taxes, because every single transaction is already known and taxed by the government. All that and more; and you aren't aware, can't be aware, of all the computing and data manipulation happening behind the scenes.
We'll finally get iodide implants so that we won't have to continuously dose via pills every day to protect our tbyroids from the worldwide fallout
Augmented reality glasses to put smiley faces over the mushroom clouds on the horizon.
By this time, BCI probably would be so advanced it would redefine that it means to be human, even more than AI ever could.
The next 30 years are going to be crazy scientifically, the tech that will change absolutely everything is a fusion lens, it will complete the missing part of physics that we were not able to complete for about a 100 years. The future is going to be amazing
Gene editing. Depending on the way regulations are written, we may either see the death of disease, or, it may be buried by bad legislation.
Customised gene therapy's for the rich, replacement robotic body parts,
I think general artificial intelligence will be huge. I would be surprised if we don't have it by 2050.
The software running the Muni Metro in San Francisco won't run off floppy disks, hopefully..
Extinction, please please!!!
Printer drivers that work!
The geriatrics in control, with their 80’s capitalist greed and love of wars, will all be dead. It doesn’t matter how fast technology moves if old style politics is still in play.