Growing donor organs from patient's own cells. So many people die because their bodies reject the transplants.
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Bionics. In the show, The Expanse there's a scene where a guy who had his arm cut off in a space accident is trying to get his company to not cheap out and to pay for a bionic arm replacement instead of regrowing him a new arm. The bionic arm being greatly more superior than a normal arm.
Lately, robotics and prostheses are becoming so advanced I can see this as happening to where people will eventually want artificial designer parts over their own.
We had quite the discussion at work about this very scene (I am loosely related to OSHA stuff), at some point people might think of deliberately having work "accidents" so the employer has to pay for superior replacement parts. And then have an advantage on the job market because of this. Same could go for sports.
I guess technologically, we are very close, but might need to work on the whole ethics part a bit more?
Having said that, I would not mind some advanced Kiroshis to replace my screwed up eyeballs.
Surely it would work like a car warranty, where a certain level is free and you would have to pay extra for the good stuff. For example, you lose your arm in a work accident, company replaces your lost arm with arm-replacelement-mk1-TM which is equivalent-ish to a regular human arm. However, if you want top of the line arm it will cost extra and company will just pay for surgery and base arm replacement, you must cover the difference. You want anything other than the Honda civic of arms? Gotta pay that premium baby! Otherwise embrace the beige mediocraty life.
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This might be in the books but I remember iy being because it's the Belter way to have a bionic arm. Regrowing is what Inners would do.
Actually that makes a lot of sense in context of that scene, considering all the genetic struggles belters have to deal with growing up in low G.
Fusion generator reactors are getting closer and closer with each breakthrough. Countries are routinely putting big money behind these projects, and it's conceivable that we see this within our lifetime.
Experiments were recently successful in freezing a rat kidney, thawing it out after 100 days, and surgically re-implanting it. It worked. This breakthrough could be the thing needed to allow for human hibernation aboard long term spaceflights. (Powered by cold fusion, naturally)
Quantum computing is very interesting, and could be a gateway-breakthrough that leads to all sorts of miraculous inventions. The ability of a super computer to precisely model interactions between molecules and protein folding, reliably allowing for the continued improvement to, literally, every drug we use today.
CRISPR, Genetic screenings, and the ability to regrow autologous transplants from host tissue is fascinating. Having to donate organs may become a thing of the past.
Teleportation is just a high tech suicide booth.
If we are talking realistic sci fi then microcompliant devices and nanomachines (TRUE nanomachines, not just the tiny but nowhere near nanoscale robots we have now)
Smart drugs are already a thing but they are getting much better every year and are pretty sci fi when you dig down into them.
Flying cars. We have the tech already.
Flying cars
Nah fam, I'm good on that one. I see enough carnage on the roads with normal cars.
Yeah, flying cars are even worse than land cars. Imagine how much less efficient parking and take off would be. Imagine all those cars circling the sky waiting to park. Would we need to cut down all the urban trees? Would we build even bigger parking lots? Huge runways and landing pads everywhere? It sounds like hell.
It sounds like hell.
Another good point. Ever heard a helicopter land? That's what flying car highways will sound like nonstop
Also imagine ending up in a car crash when you're like, 100 metres above the ground.
Then again, self driving cars would be much safer off the ground. None of that 'which pedestrian should we run over' ethical dilemmas that car industry moral philosophers and actuarials currently grapple with.
Which pedestrian should we crash on is the new hot debate.
The Trolley problem doesn’t go away in the air (not that it’s that big of a deal to begin with). In fact, it might even be worse. Your car is falling. Do you crash into the crowded street or the crowded building? Which one? The destructive potential is much higher. If safety is really a concern, don’t you worry about giving every person a missile?
Flying cars “solve” a non-problem, because long distance highway travel is already the least dangerous. Most accidents are at intersections and points of conflicts. But eventually flying cars need to land and be near other cars and people. There will still be traffic jams, vast fields of parking lots, and cities made uncomfortable to actually walk or exist in.
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Flying cars. We have the tech already.
Yeah, they're called helicopters and we rightfully regulate the shit out of them because flying without proper certifications and inspections is extremely dangerous for the public. Because when one idiot crashes, it won't only be him going out, but he will cause destruction and carnage on the ground.
Medicine is a huge emerging field right now, and there's so much potential for benefit from humanity depending on how well we can govern this new tech
- smart drugs / treatments specific to a patient's genetics
- on site genome testing during infections
- gene therapy
- organs & prosthetics
- detailed monitoring (while relatively non-invasive) in intensive care, notifying HCPs early before issues develop
- very fast vaccine development
We are getting very close to commercially viable 3d printed livers, granted that's like the EASIEST organ to culture but it is still amazing to me.
Star trek teleportation is a suicide booth, but wormholes can do the same thing. Just bend space to bring two points together, step through the hole and unbend. Teleportation without disassembly.
Did you not see my earlier comment about tidal spaghettification?
Sure there's no disassembly but nothing living can survive that deformation and same with most materials. Basically the only thing you can send through wormholes are raw materials or anything you don't mind ending up seven hundred times longer and commensurately thinner.
Universal translator. Google buds basically do this already.
You might be interested in the pop-sci book Soonish: ten emerging technologies that'll improve and/or ruin everything. I haven't read it myself, but I've read the authors' other book about space colonization, and it was excellent so I would expect this one to be as well.
Ah that's Zach Weinersmith the author of SMBC, it has to be excellent. Haven't read it but will put it on my list now
Actually safe autonomous transport and delivery would be a great next step. But the enterprises are putting their pre-alpha releases into the public and killing people which is souring the public to the notion.
To be fair, Tesla is the primary culprit of this. Waymo and other AV companies have just been slowly but steadily ramping up their testing and operating in relatively safe ways, and they are by and large doing pretty well from the coverage I've read. It's not happening as quickly as anybody hoped, but we're seeing steady improvements over time.
Tesla is just reckless, though, branding things in ways that make the whole AV endeavor look much worse than it deserves.
- Big uptick in the amount of human activity in space — tech there already, economy starting to manifest it. Like 10,000 humans in space at any given time, then 100,000, then 1,000,000, and so on
- If we can get a slightly lighter solar sail material, that’s the last missing tech piece needed to send probes to Alpha Centauri. We’d need massive laser arrays so tech alone would precede economic manifestation by a while. Human laser-accelerated probes can reach 0.3 c, and arrive at the star in about 15 years. The probe’s design is the size of a thumb drive
- AI is obviously making big strides
- honestly my thumbs are cramping up, but there’s lots more. drone-v-drone warfare, all semi-autonomous
- Growing perfect genetic match organs to implant
- mRNA delivered by microplasmids is incredible. There are easily a million life-enhancing distinct uses of it that involve temporarily building any protein we want in a patient’s cells, endogenously, with controlled expression. That is crazy powerful technology
- Fusion power’s like almost there. I think we’re at the “now scale it” phase
- Bombarding Earth by hurling containers full of rocks out of railgun launch tubes on the moon
- Sex robots
- Translating to and from animal languages
- Cloning, which has existed for decades now, is somehow totally invisible to media attention. Like, in the time since Dolly the sheep was in the headlines, someone could have theoretically produced an actual army of human clones and have them hidden somewhere
- Telepathy via neural implants
That’s some of the sci fi stuff we either have now and just are too harried and exhausted to contemplate, or that we’re just on the verge of creating.
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Brain Machine Interface
Hopefully not from Elon Musk but he might well get there first
I'm good on things tied into the brain. Now things tied near the brain like sub vocalisation or little eye twitches or even somehow passive brain wave scans or something maybe. But actual hardware tied into my brain I'm gonna take a pass on.
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AGI lead government that is written like a constitution and bill of rights. The infinite persistence factor without human needs or motivations is a major improvement over anything that has ever existed.
Asimov wrote a story about super machines that governed the world out of environmental collapse and human extinction.
Do you remember the name of the story?
After looking through a bunch of synopses of Asimov's stuff, I wonder if it might be this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_the_World?useskin=vector
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Apart from the alignment problem*, having unchangeable laws can be really bad. The bill of rights shows that for tye US constitution, now what if a 'new' need arises for the law shows it self.
* the alignment problem is the still unsolved problem of getting even simple machine learning models/AIs to do what we want.
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Clarke's 3001 had a whole post script about all the sci-fi elements that had actually been realised since he wrote 2001 (back in 1968). It's rather an interesting list, but unfortunately my copy of the book is buried deep in a moving box atm. so I'm not going to quote it.
Breadlines except for meal replacement drinks. We have meal replacement drinks we have breadlines. Eventually this will make sense.
I hope so, because you're not making sense. Could you rephrase?
There are plenty of parts of the world where governments/aid groups have to distribute food. Most of it is staples like bread and rice. We also have these protein drink things now that brag they can replace any meal. At some point the cost of those drinks will fall to making it worth giving out meal replacement drinks to people instead of bags of rice.
I'm not sure any of those are full diet replacements though. They serve as a good breakfast or lunch, but I don't think it's recommended you replace all meals with them. At least not in more ideal circumstances.
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Thank you, I had no clue what breadline meant, this clears up everything.
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Fusion reactors
Plentiful and reliable public transportation
Astroid mining
Had me at Fusion reactors and Asteroid mining, but reliable public transportation? What kind of pie in the sky pipe dream is that!
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....not teleportation.
Space colonization , I could see a colony on the moon being feasible in the next 20 years probably more akin to an oil field where it's mainly people extracting minerals and not recreational.
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AI
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