Computer phones. As in I just connect to screen and keyboard, and phone is my main desktop.
Cheaper EVs.
Working lab fusion.
EVs are pretty cheap now. How cheap did you think?
Slightly cheaper than fuel by 10% for similar cars (including country of origin)
As cheap as gasoline cars
Compassion, empathy, socialism.
Those thin transparent screens you see in sci fi movies.
I definitely thought we’d have Ar glasses by now
this
Ability to live in balance with the earth
Only after the nuclear winter
Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets
Really fancy guillotines, with Internet Access, Bluetooth, and AI, of course.
“I’m Alan, your Virtual Execution Assistant. I can offer you a choice of a Last Cigarette, or Last Words, which would you like to choose?”
Hoverboards.
I think the self tightening shoes would have been doable. But we still didn’t get those.
Nike actually did make those. they sell them.
I thought we would be able to redo our dna in adults using viruses or other vectors completely. Where we are now I thought we would be in like 2010. So we are making progress but I thought we would be farther along and genetic disease would be a thinf of the past.
Fusion lol.
Better space tech or at least a moon base.
Modular body parts like in cyberpunk
Technically we have modular body parts. They are pretty damn good too. Just not good enough that people would replace them because they are vetter.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It’s 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments…
I understand that it’s probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it’s still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
Something is wrong with the ones you’re buying, then.
Studies show that they do, on average, last dozens of times longer. Personally I replace them way less often than incandescent.
I suppose the earliest ones were worse and there are definitely garbage ones out there. And even good brands have a did here and there. And if you have poor/inconsistent power, or placing them in hot, enclosed fixtures, they don’t perform as well as they could.
I bought some on clearance about a decade ago, my wife thought I was crazy buying 20 bulbs, I gave 1/4 of them away and I’ve still not run out.
Who were the studies done by? Philips?
The DOE, Energy Star, others
Oh that’s a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
This is common (engineered predictable fault.)
The Phoebus Cartel was objectively terrible, but it turns out there are perfectly good engineering reasons to limit them to 1000 hours. It has to do with the chemistry of tungsten. Those bulbs that last forever give off exceedingly little light, and the 1000 hour rule is from a standard that predates the cartel.
no hot filaments…
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don’t even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won’t exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling ‘boob’ light).
I’ve been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee’s basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I’m a pretty small sample size. I know I’m paying a premium for that approach, but it’s not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
I was there for the transition period between incandescents and LEDs: The CFL.
Buy dimmer, filament style LEDs. They don’t burn themselves out hy heat at least.
Otherwise you’re facing planned obsolescence.
When I was a kid in the 80s I thought we’d absolutely have some kind of moon base by now. More space stuff in general. What is more “future” than space?
Green energy is maybe 10 years behind where younger me would have wished it to be, it feels we’re close to some big breakthroughs. I’m still hopefully to see some game changing things in my lifetime.
There’s just really not a very useful reason outside of “because we can”, so it hasn’t really been a priority. Still, that’s kinda the point of the Artemis program, so we’re getting there.
Usefulness is no fun. Those 80s and 90s attitudes wouldn’t worry about something like that. We’d have done it just show off and/or to keep the Soviets from doing it first. Don’t tell us we have rocks at home, I want space rocks. I want a bucket full of ice from the rings of Saturn. I want a slab of something that got melted by Venus. That stuff is cool.
I hope they do something fun with Artemis. It doesn’t feel like most people are excited for space anymore and that bums me out.
For All Mankind is coming back in a few days, so that will have to do for now.
Synthetic meat that’s actually edible/palatable
It’s hard to synthesize the animal suffering that people crave
That is objectively a silly thing to say.
I think it depends on what you mean when you say “synthetic meat”.
I use quorn mince when I’m making spaghetti bolognese and lasagne. If you add marmite to the “mince” when you’re doing the initial cook the final dish is indistinguishable from real meat tbh.
I agree that other meat replacements aren’t the same and probably won’t be for a while, although Aldi have recently started selling something that resembles a steak which I want to try.
We have that already and I’ve eaten it.
I’ve tried a lot and have not found any of it very appetizing.
Most has a very rubbery texture as soon as it cools slightly.
Very unpleasant.
I’d rather just not have any meat than have it.
But it you have had the good stuff, please send me your recommendations.
Good synthetic meat exists, it’s just more expensive to produce so you usually can’t buy it at like a corner store or something
Good music. Why does music in the 21st century have to suck so bad? It’s not that much different than what we had in the 20th century, the quality just steadily decreased instead of increased. It’s all divas screaming, really boring rap, or just dull, art-less rock.
Today, even young people are discovering that the Classic Rock era had very cool music. It would have been like my generation discovering the music of the pre-war 30s.
There is very good 21st century music, which wouldn’t have come had it not been for 20th century music.
Thinking igorrr, emergence of gqom (that’s very pop for gqom), post rock emerged in the 20th and has a reminiscence of tripped out 70s rock bands, but bands like thee silver mount zion are also very early 21st century.
It’s also not surprising we are hitting a barrier after electroacoustic music sort of enlarged the field a lot, the last major innovations were sunths, electronic soundFX and DAWs and these are all 20th century changes. The 20th century saw more innovation than the previous centuries. Fusion of styles, while older, has given interesting merges in the 21st century as well.
But the 20th century will be hard to surpass, pretty much as by the end of the 19th century classical music was running circles.
I like music from the decade before my birth and swing became big at one point and many folk discover there is a lot of classical music they like. I get what your saying but like there is a lot of historical crap pop to which is kinda always around.
Cool, I have a degree in Music History, and you are 100% correct, there is a LOT of bad historical music. Luckily, we don’t have to deal with it much, because most of it has been filtered out over time.
There’s a loose rule in all Art, that 95% of art is mostly mediocre. Only about 5% is worthy, and only about 1% is truly good, or great. When youre in the midst of it, most of what you are hearing is junk, and you have to be the filter, and it can be exhausting.
But if you go back to the old stuff, it’s basically been curated by critics and fans over the decades, and mostly the best stuff has survived, so it’s easier to find great, satisfying music.
And if you’re ambitious, you can sort through the debris, and find the odd forgotten classic rock gem, like Shoes:
Or Yaz:
Or Bread:
I wonder about that in the modern age though. I mean there has to be a factor of how easy it is to copy and store. So likely a lot was lost before performance recording capability. In the car I mostly listen to npr but when I don’t care for whats on I will just sorta jump between stations and there is a thing now for stations to kinda take a time period but they don’t seem to be very discriminatory about it. On the other hand now that we can call up any song we want likely you will see the cream come up to the top on what gets asked for a lot. I have one particular gripe though because my fav band tull had this album crafting they did where the position of songs, especially the first and last, were real important. They have these special editions they kinda just tacked songs on them and it ruins the flow. Its impossible, at least with amazon, to get the device to do the original vs the special edition that it defaults to.
Yeah, one of the cool things about the Classic Rock era was how real artists would program their albums for flow. The Beatles were really the first to do that, and they completely changed music industry sales from a single format to an album format, which was far more profitable for both artists, and record companies, which only encouraged more people to become musicians, and record companies to make more albums.
So, yeah, when you get some special edition, and they start inserting alternate or demo or live versions INTO the original program, it totally fucks up the artist’s intentions.
Luckily most of the time, they give us a nicely remastered version of the original on a disc alone, and all the other stuff on a separate disc.
But that’s only if you use CDs, which more and more people are going back to, fortunately. I never left, I still have my original CD collection, about 5000 of them. Don’t get excited I was in the music biz for years, a LOT of them were free, but still good. Got a killer discount, too, basically manufacturing cost, so about $3 a CD, back in the 90s. I would buy the entire catalogue of a band like Led Zeppelin, or Prince, or Talking Heads, or the Eagles, etc.
As for music from before recordings, I don’t even like to think about it. Many of the great composers, like Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven were known to be astonishing virtuoso keyboard players, who could improvise incredibly complex music on the spot. At a concert, the guest of honor, usually some local VIP, would supply a tune, and they would play it on the piano, and then build an entire work out of thin air in front of the audience. Can you imagine hearing a recording of that?
Realistically?
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Housing that doesn’t cost a fortune
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Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you
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Food that’s both affordable and worth eating
None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.
That’s not tech, that’s policy. Technologically there are no holdups to this, capitalism just needs it to not be so
Your answer is something you want to force into the conversation, not what OP asked.
You’re not wrong, but that’s not the conversation man.
Yeah, the reason we don’t have those isn’t technological. We could have it today if we collectively decided that we wanted it.
Well, that plus militant organizing
That’s not really how it works, or we’d already have them. People in China have those things because they beat the fascist KMT back to Formosa, and by force subordinated the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism.
As it is written in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra:
It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.
Recently quoted by Bruce Lee, than in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain
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Genetic-level diagnoses and treatments.
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Inexpensive, rapid genome sequencing.
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Commonplace genetic counselling for more than just pregnancy.
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Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
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Cloned tissues (i.e. blood, skin), organs (i.e. heart, lungs, kidneys) for transplant or repair.
I graduated university the same year the Human Genome Project first published completion. Certainly, that project uncovered more questions than answers.
Also, we’ve done an absolutely garbage job of becoming appropriate stewards of this technology. Primarily, today, it would be used to identify, segregate, subjugate, and eventually kill a portion of the population.
Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
I feel that for laws to exist, you first need some accidents to prompt the public outcry to get them passed. And accidents in genetics are going to be very messy indeed
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