The future's so bright… I want to wear AR glasses
The collapse of Democracy, loss of trust in institutions, the corruption of social norms, the rise of ignorant bigotry and wilful stupidity. All of this sucks.
It also sucks that the dictator of Russia thinks he's some kind of historic tsar destined to have "the great" after his name, if he can only commit enough pointless atrocities, or at least keep his population distracted from his own abject incompetence as a leader. Imagine if he'd spent all that oil money on actually fixing the Russian economy?
It also sucks that the US electorate has chosen to elect a felon, fraudster, and sex predator to its highest office, aided by corrupt justices in its highest court, and a bunch of weak-minded, weak-willed fools in its Congress.
It's all a huge shame, since technology is making incredible strides
and it's incredibly exciting. Sure, we don't have Jetsons-style aircars, but
here's a list of stuff we do have that's frankly mind-blowing.
Tricorders, Datasticks, Wrist Computers
The iPhone, Apple Watch, and Android-based equivalents are better and more useful than pretty much any SF device of the same kind. An iPhone strapped to your wrist would be a superior device (ignoring ridiculous magic) than any similar device shown in SF. Even futuristic "post iPhone" devices shown in SF (e.g. the glass slates in The Expanse) don't really match modern smart phones.
The communicators in Star Trek: Next Generation didn't even have call waiting, which was something we had on regular phones at the time.
Solar Power
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the price of solar power is now so low that the only thing stopping it from simply replacing all other power sources is the fact it isn't sunny everywhere all the time. If we just had a grid that could send power from where it's sunny to other places (and it's being built) and conveniently store and recharge power on things that need to move, there'd really no reason to generate power any other way.
Yes, climate change is bad, but if we're not actively stupid we already have all the technology we need to solve the problem both in the near term (build more modern nuclear power plants) and the long (create a worldwide solar grid).
Oh yeah, and we seem to have solved the population crisis so bad we might need to encourage folks to have more kids at some point. Maybe not treat women (or biologically female persons if you prefer) who have kids as third class citizens? I dunno.
Nuclear Power… Fusion Power?
We can make nuclear power plants that are safer and have a smaller environmental impact than any other form of power generation. Right now, it's not cheap, but nuclear power is exactly the kind of technology that would get super cheap if we just scaled it.
Never mind, fusion seems to have gone from being "fifty years away" to actually getting serious private investment. Someone might actually get it to work!
Battery Technology
Electric cars are actually the least interesting thing that we've gotten from improvements in battery techology. Moore's law predicted we'd have cheap supercomputers that could fit on our wrists by now, but it didn't say they'd be able to run all day on battery and have a fast wireless network connection.
For quite a while, Moore's Law actually seemed to be saying the opposite. A modern gaming PC consumes an embarassing amount of power compared to, say, the very expensive graphics workstation I had custom made for myself back in 2001.
Insanely Good Cellular Networks
We have a very fast cable connection here in Oulu, Finland (2h south of the Artic Circle by car…). But when it wobbles and I switch to sharing my iPhone's unlimited data plan, the network gets better.
AI (sort of)
OK, it's not really intelligent, but it does pretty much ace the Turing Test, so while AGI may be a big con, the fact is we've now got something that passes the Turing Test and can run locally on your laptop or phone.
Can it think? No. Can it conduct an "intelligent" conversation? Sure, it may make shit up or hallucinate, but find me a person who doesn't sometimes do that.
And if you're a programmer, the interface for these things is trivial. You pass it a bunch of text and you get back a bunch of text. For advanced cases you can add images and so on. It's so much easier than, say, displaying a window with "hello world" in it was on a 1984 Mac.
To give an example, I have an AI-powered tool for my blog to create summaries of my posts, and the API is not much more than:
const post = ... // get the post source
const response = await ai(`Here is a blog post I've written in markdown format, please write a blurb for it or extract a key paragraph. ${post}`)
const summary = response.text
Sure, it doesn't write very well, but it was super easy to implement.
Oh, and I can right-click and have an AI proofread anything.
AR and VR headsets
The Meta Quest 3 is amazing and really quite cheap. The Vision Pro seems even more amazing, but not cheap. But both cost peanuts compared to even mediocre VR headsets from 10 years ago.
3D Printers
You can 3D print in plastic, metal, or wood. You can print subtractively or additively. The precision of 3D prints is such that you can print parts that should fit together perfectly, and they fit together perfectly.
And this is no longer for toys. Even with inexpensive printers, you can print car and motorcycle parts or entire drones (aside from the circuits and motors),
And the devices to do this can be bought for the price of a high-end power tool. It's nuts.
Video Conferencing
You can do business from anywhere via video conferencing on laptops, phones, and TVs. In fact it's so common, we've seen several generations of social norms evolve (e.g. today, there's an unspoken threshold at which almost everyone turns off their camera).
Shared Office Space
We Inc may have been a huge scam, but the idea remains brilliant and there are plenty of people offering shared office space sustainably today.
The business I founded in 2001 had to commit to a multi-year AUD $8000/month lease. If we had shared office space we'd have had $100k/year more to spend on anything we needed… or just salaries.
And don't even talk about the horrific price we paid for a 56kB ISDN connection.
Cube Sats
Getting to be an astronaut has never been a reasonable goal for more people. But for the price of a new Porsche 911, BMW M5, or Tesla Cybertruck, you can launch your own satellite.
Tiny, Customizable, Powerful, Embeddable Computers
You can get fully functional computers like the Arduino or Raspberry Pi for almost nothing, and program them to do AI, drive displays, take pictures, you name it.
So, if you want to build your own satellite, it's not that big a deal to hook up a radio to a tiny computer and a fancy camera, solar cells, batteries, etc. and you've got your own spy satellite. And quite a few startups have done basically this.
Very Fast Trains
You might not know this if you live in the US, bu in many countries outside the US, trains are so cheap and convenient that it's hard to justify driving long distance by car. In Finland the intercity trains can reach 200km/h—you simply can't get places as fast in a car—and the cities tend to be highly walkable. It doesn't hurt that gas is highly taxed, but if you had a choice of driving or getting there quicker and being able to work and go to a restaurant while zooming through the landscape at 150km/h, would you drive?
It would be great if the WiFi on the trains were a little better. I mean, sometimes I have to wait a few minutes for the network to be quick enough for me to push a PR.
Genetic Engineering
You can literally buy a kit for very little money that allows kids to use gene shears to make a plant glow in the dark. This isn't even all that recent.
More recently, there was this worldwide pandemic. It was in the news.
Very shortly after COVID-19 was first detected, scientists in China were able to sequence the virus's DNA and publish it. Other scientists at Moderna downloaded the genome and tailored a highly effective vaccine against it over a weekend. While it needed about a year to pass safety testing, the team themselves were sufficiently convinced of their technology that they all innoculated themselves immediately. It seems highly likely to me that a lot of Trump's bravado about the pandemic came from he and those close to him having early access to these vaccines.
Software Development is Crazy Easy
And no, I'm not talking about using AI to write a to do list manager.
I literally wrote a utility program yesterday using npx create-xinjs-blueprint
in less time than it would have taken me to do the same thing using
Realbasic.
I actually have a stack that lets you build web-apps top-to-bottom, desktop apps, and tiny utilities as easily as I used to be able to in the 1990s. You can't draw the user interface (which is the final missing piece) but everything else is as easy or easier—I just need to wrap some convenience tooling around it and write documentation. So much documentation.
Air Cars
I lied. You can actually buy air cars now.