Hoverboards obviously.
I would fund a truly fair AI and a very gentle, but firm, self replicating robot army to enforce it’s benevolent will on everyone.
So basically SkyNet, after I make a pointer arithmetic mistake.
Stupid integer overflow!
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an “AI” controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won’t work because you’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you’re trying to “fix” traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn’t really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it’s as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a “pick one” situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make and the metrics you’re using don’t really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that’s considered “normal” in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they’d still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your “cars not driving” metric, that’s anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).
That’s not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.
And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It’s a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.
The specific numbers dont matter.
If you take 1 million cars with an average useage time of 1 hour a day and reduce that by 10 minutes thats roughly the same as taking 1 in 6 cars off the road from an emisions standpoint.
Make it 500,000 cars and reduce it by only 5 minutes its roughly the same as 41,000 cars worth of emissions that werent pumped out of exhaust pipes.
No it doesnt solve everything. Yes a well designed public transport system would be a much bigger environmental benefit. But its something that could be done with current tech and without massive infrastructure overhauls with a real tangible benefit for the environment and society.
The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You’re arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren’t car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren’t originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that’s a remotely reasonable argument? It’s utter nonsense.
Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid1, we’re literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.
1. It’s not, just build other infrastructure instead of more roads. From a strictly capitalist perspective it pays for itself when more space can be used for taxable business instead of the dead weight of parking, and those businesses are more accessible to foot traffic making them more profitable and therefore generating more taxes. Not to mention the maintenance costs.
Faster-than-light travel. Which is physically impossible, but whatever.
Maybe not, if we where to find a cheat way with wormholes.
Physically impossible as per our current understanding of physics, mathematics, and technology.
room temp superconductors.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock – you’re going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.
Your objections will be noted.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
… Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?
I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?
I think the optimal outcome is that technology develops to permit our society to support increasing amounts of inequality. The increasing inequality will happen anyway, we’ll just be able to bear it, or not. I’m won’t suggest it’s a good outcome, just the optimal one.
Space based mirrors for asteroid mining. Bounce a sh*tton of light from the sun around and just melt asteroids. Love that in the Troy Rising series.
Lots of problems getting there irl (need a better way to get out of the gravity well, and light speed lag for command and control would be a real issue) but the idea is just too fun.
That sounds like a great way to accidentally muzzle sweep a thousand international satellites with a billion-kWh laser beam. Not saying it’s entirely a bad idea, but having invisible unshielded beams of stupendous energy bouncing all over the solar system sounds like a recipe for a couple accidental meltings. I could just see someone making an adjustment to the next mining target without informing China and whoops, that secret manned satellite you sent up a couple months ago is now slag.
Yeah they deal with that in the book series. Lots of AI who do space traffic routing space ships around the beams so as not to get fried.
It’s also used as a weapon in the books to defend the solar system. Fune books. I read em once a year or so.
Depends how it’s focused. It wouldn’t be a straight coherent beam, because that would actually break thermodynamics if you could produce it from sunlight.
Ooh, this is new info. How so?
One way to look at it is loss of information. If you point a (brightness-tolerant) telescope at a lasar beam, you can’t see much. Pretty much every beam is the same. If you point it at the sun there’s all kinds of interesting features. Another way is to consider that light is a gas made of photons, and you’re essentially talking about making every particle spontaneously align, which in a heat engine would obviously be ridiculous. All of these are entropy-negative processes, and a passive mirror or lens is passive and can only do reversible operations.
Another fun fact that comes out of this is that a magnifying glass can never make a spot hotter than the sun. Here’s an XKCD what-if that goes into it - and might honestly be where I learned this first.
How about a UBI? Do social policies count as technologies? They do in 4X games, so I’m going with it.
I would categorize UBI as a policy/law, more than a tech thing.
Yeah. But on the other hand, isn’t civics sort of a technology too? Policies were invented, no?
I guess you could say the UBI has already been invented, but I think practical implementation is important too. Same as if I’d said we should do fusion power or something.
Nanotech robots for garbage recycling.
Imagine if we dumped our trash into one end of a big fuckoff machine and out the other end it came out in microscopic pieces into hoppers for reuse or correct disposal.
Throw in an old appliance and out the other end comes the aluminium from the body, the steel, the copper from the wiring, the silica… you get the idea.
But they’d just realize we are all garbage and then gray goo the entire earth
Nah thats the dystopian version, op specified “Exotic” thats the one that doesnt go wrong and kill us all.
“Exotic” isn’t synonymous with “safe”
Dont tell me how my hypothetical science fiction invention works, you dont understand the hypothetical sciemce fiction research we would be hypothetically doing.
hypothetically cool, and very hypothetically legal
Fusion, nuclear propulsion, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, biomining, biological fuel cells
Doors that go “swish” when they open.
Make them open and close in a circular pattern like a camera aperture and I’m in
genetically engineered housing
We can all live in big fuck-off mushrooms like the Telvanni showed us
Toilet: Why!.. WHY!!!
I’m convinced that, despite his denial, Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory was a Red Scare-dodging caricature of historical materialism / scientific socialism. I’d put my money there.
Do I have to choose one? The world food program is never overfunded, and that would buy a stupid amount of lobbying for whatever overlooked domestic issue, or even just research grants for neglected but foundational things. Boring/ugly animals could also use conservation.
Maybe we understood the question differently: are you saying that if you could choose between researching Star Trek’s food replicator and feeding people for a day, you’d choose fish?
No. And cool wording by the way.
Assuming 100% success, yeah, replicators would be a great choice. Or maybe that skin cream that fixes everything including intangible life problems from that one short. Assuming actual science stuff, benevolent AI maybe, so we don’t have to worry about the other kind, and so it can hopefully research everything else.
Those machines that can make food instantly for sure. Put a few of those bad boys in the right place and we’ve solved world hunger. Also, healthy tasty food for those of us who can’t cook and can’t afford to eat at restaurants.
Granted, people in the restaurant would largely lose their job, but we can retrain them for something else like we did with stagecoach drivers, telephone operators and honest politicians before them 🤷
Farmers would also loose their jobs.
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I hate it when my job gets loose.
Opps
Replicators! Yes!!
Some restaurants probably will still exist as a premium option. And chefs can create recipes and sell them online.
They’ll probably add DRM to it. Crap! 😬
Atomically Precise Manufacturing!
Might actually happen in the upcoming decades.
FISH!
I’d say budget 3D printed meals are around the corner.
Proper gourmet replicated meals, 60yrs.
Van Neumann probes
Sentient von Neumann probes :)
How far off do you think we are from this becoming a reality?
One AGI breakthrough - so couple of years to never.
Imagine we send an AGI in a probe that can operate in 100-400K without oxygen or water or food or gravity, and not some brain in a flesh.
