What's a sci-fi thing you feel is achievable with our current level of technology that you'd love to see become a thing?
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Here is something we don't have that I think we could: Automated vegetable farming.
I've seen these watering gantries that are fixed at the center of a circular field and then rotate radially around that point to water the field. Could you use that as a rail with an effector arm on it that can plant, weed, tend, fertilize and harvest the field, such that in goes seeds and out comes vegetables? Without the liability of free roaming robotic tractors and combine harvesters. Surely the issue here would be software.
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Post scarcity society
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I can see replacing cash with transfers but not removing currency entirely, but that's my POV. What would you replace it with instead?
What would you replace it with instead?
Nothing. Humanity as a whole would have to evolve past the carrot and stick mentality for this to work. That's why I said it probably won't happen
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Augmented reality overlaying historical photos and 3d models so you can literally see history as your walking.
Imagine being able to visit The White City that was built for the World's Fair in Chicago. Or seeing New York before sky scrapers dominated the landscape.
While you're admiring a building which was there in 1925, you get run over by a car which is there in 2025.
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Post scarcity society
As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
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The viewscreen from Star Trek. It's actually real but nobody really wants to use it.
Phones, tablets, and laptops have had video chat for years. Apple brought it to actual TV a couple years ago. The idea is you use the Apple TV set-top box, and you get a squared-S-shaped clip that mounts an iPhone to the top of a TV so the rear camera array can point out into the room. You pair the two, and your whole TV turns into a viewscreen, just like on the starship Enterprise.
I've explained this to a few people and the reaction is usually "okay why TF would I wanna do that?" So imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas, or other "big family holiday" thing where you have that one person who won't participate because it's their partner's family's turn to see the kids or whatever... so, the Apple TV is like $100. And somebody is gonna have an iPhone. And these days, everyone has a TV, at least in the west, and they're 55" or bigger. So you get the TV in the corner of the room and you set it up so you're broadcasting the whole living room and maybe part of the kitchen or dining room, and you connect it to another family/part of the family who is doing the same. And your TV is now a window into that other living room, and people can go up to the screen and interact, or wave from across the room. Now if it's like Thanksgiving and it's based around eating, you could even run the end of the table up to the TV (so the TV is basically sat at one end of the table with no one in between) on both sides so when you look down the table, you're looking into that other room.
Could also just get two laptops with webcams doing a zoom call, and HDMI the display over to your TVs
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I'm on board with ethical and opt-in telemetry. Knowing how your users interact with your app is very useful, but not many companies can show restraint when money is involved.
100% this. Telemetry and market research are fine. Hell Some opt in, totally 100% disableable targeted ads are fine as long as they're not excessive and in the way. Flagrant selling of info however, does not spark joy.
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I'm on board with ethical and opt-in telemetry. Knowing how your users interact with your app is very useful, but not many companies can show restraint when money is involved.
Fair point. Ethical opt-in seems alright
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There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food's famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can't grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won't be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said "you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here", then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money,
Food is subsidized and highly regulated by the government.
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As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
so kill the shareholders, then they won't care about their value.
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Just because something is easier to implement doesn't mean it will work better.
Honestly, that's the biggest hurdle our current economic systems are facing. People go for the easy option that seems like it should work instead of the longer term plan that has more flexibility and chance for success.
The problem with your suggestion is that it still hinges on the capitalist system to provide for people. And thus is far easier to exploit.
Yeah sure, but you have got to be realistic, you're talking about a 20/50 year plan even if you get everyone to agree with it. Yes, Capitalism is bad, yes there are problems with UBI, but the thing you're proposing is impossible, whereas UBI is something that could be implemented tomorrow, and would set a good foundation to move things in the right direction. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
A moonbase.
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While you're admiring a building which was there in 1925, you get run over by a car which is there in 2025.
Or "blink twice to unlock a 2 hour view of this building for
59,9958,99! Limit time offer only." -
As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
OP says, "with our current current level of technology."
We have the technology to overcome any logistics issue pertaining to eliminating scarcity (and by extension, poverty). What we lack is the societal structure.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
Wow this hits the feels so hard… Like it’s impressive how hard we have worked against this goal…
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which are all capitalist, thank you for agreeing with me.
I think you might be mistaken if you think that corruption and greed are exclusive to capatalist societies. Yeah, it's rampant in captialism, but it can be present in any type of economic system. Greed and corruption are a human trait, not an economic one.
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If their profit motive aligns with my own interests
Their profit motive does not align with your interests - not by choice. Their hand was forced by labor and consumer protection laws. Take off the legal constraints, and suddenly their business model includes things like slavery, child labor, unsafe work conditions, insane hours, monopolies... these aren't crazy-extreme hypotheticals, they're things we've had to actively step in and say "no!" before because they were actually happening.
Companies are not your friend. They're not even a symbiotic parasite: they're a barely contained cancer.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Plenty of other people's interests don't align with mine either - these days, it seems like most people's interests don't. What makes a corporation less reliable than my fellow Americans?
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You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money,
Food is subsidized and highly regulated by the government.
You can go to the hardware store and buy a screwdriver. Or go to walmart and buy a frying pan. Etc.
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
I never stopped dreaming about flying cars, I just think it's not gonna happen because a crash would easily kill people just sitting in their homes.
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We're so close. My dryer turns all my stuff inside out. I feel like if it can do that, it can fold the stuff too...
Damn, never heard that machines could do that already.
