For me it’s quantum computing - especially considering its impact on most current encryption methods
The steady improvement in computer speed and efficiency (unfortunately brought down by bloated software, but in some areas you feel it in absolute terms), storage and memory size, and EV technology. I hope in 2040 there will be cheap powerful e-scooters and e-motorcycles.
I hope so too. Nice, affordable transport for many
Also e-scooters are just plain fun. 20mph on an e-scooter feels like 40mph on a motorcycle that feels like 80mph in a car.
I really hope that storage increases faster than our recording tech, to the point that everyone can easily store the sum total of the internet (videos and all) on a single portable drive.
You underestimate the amount of crap (which is mostly porn, whether you like it or not) on the Internet. And resolutions will increase as cameras get better.
But in some metrics, we have already gotten there. You can download the entirety of Wikipedia and it fits in a few gigs. You could download everything (including the 800+ videos which would span multiple weeks long end to end) I made and have it be less than 1TB.
COSMIC desktop environment.
Maybe not as spectacular as quantum computing or things like that, but personally I can’t wait for it.
Hey, Desktop environments can make or break. I remember when GNOME 4 first came out, before any improvements, and there was a lot of unhappiness.
Will be cool to see a Linux Desktop environment designed by a company like System76
Just remember that when it first comes out, it’ll probably by a buggy mess and need time to develop
Reusable rocketry, specifically SpaceX Starship. If it pans out it’s going to completely change our access to space and make many of those old dreams from the 1970s plausible.
RNA vaccines for basically everything, including customized vaccines for cancer. There’s also actual progress happening in general cures for autoimmune diseases.
Is robotics too close to AI? There are multiple companies working on general-purpose humanoid robots intended for mass production with price targets in the ten to twenty thousand dollar range, we may be getting within sight of actual robot butlers.
I just hope we use Starships capabilities to put less single use hardware in Orbit. The way it is build already releases less space junk for delivering payloads, but these payloads need to be build with servicing in mind. Even building them to burn up should not be the solution
Yeah the Starship is a great idea, then Starlink et al is just fast food for space basically.
I’m really not looking forward to the commercialization of low earth orbit, and SpaceX seems to be an accelerator of this.
Low Earth orbit has been heavily commercialized for decades already. If you mean Starlink specifically, what’s wrong with it?
Looking up at the night sky and seeing a visible stream of dots
Ah, that only happens right after launch when they’re still bunched together. Once the satellites get into their final orbit they spread out. The newer models also have anti-reflection systems that make them much harder to spot, SpaceX has been working with astronomers on that.
Differentiable programming. Differentiable ray tracers for example can be used to reconstruct the geometry of something you took a picture off.
Holographic displays
E and S band fibre data transmission. 300+ terabit speeds using fibre already in use
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVTOL
3D printed homes
I used to be pretty excited about 3d printed homes, but an argument I’ve seen, that’s made me a lot more skeptical of them, is that much of the work of building isn’t putting up the actual walls, it’s all the wiring, plumbing, installing windows and climate control and insulation and roofing and whatever else like that that turns a building from essentially an artificial cave into a more livable space. A 3d printer that prints you walls out of concrete or whatever is only doing the easy part for you in that case, and not necessarily even in the most efficient or desirable manner. Not to say that the idea of more efficient ways to build housing cheaply isn’t interesting to me, I just think that it’d be something more boring, like a a bunch of improvement to modular prefab construction. 3d printing is an awesome technology, but it’s not a good option for everything
Aren’t there lego-like blocks one can use that allow for simultaneous cavity space and holes for wiring/plumbing and other infrastructure?
In my naive mind, it’s just a matter of being able to make a reliable brick set that one can snap together and then fill.
I agree, I used to work for a company that made mobile homes in a an assembly line fashion. Two of us could cut and assemble all of the interior and exterior walls in under two days for an 80 foot home. It’s all the other stuff that took time and a lot more people to piece together.
Computing at the edge.
Reduces the need to send everything to the cloud and maintains privacy.
Isn’t edge computing just a distributed cloud? With servers physically closer to end-user?
That’s a cloud-centric interpretation. Like using CDNs. That’e been around for a while.
What I think will be interesting is intelligent processing and storage on end-node devices, like a home gateway, smart appliances, or wearable devices.
That would be cool
How does it maintain privacy?
Instead of sending the data to the cloud for calculation/analytics, it does it right there on the device.
For example, an Alexa or Google Home device sends everything you say after a wake-word back to Amazon or Google. A device with sufficient edge storage and compute would be able to do the same without sending your voice outside your home.
We’re not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what edge computing is. You’ve just described client-side computing.
The “edge” is similar to a CDN. Usually some kind of application layer code that’s running in an ISP data center rather than in a cloud provider’s data center.
I explained in a different comment… Talking about edge devices not the cloud: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/edge-computing/edge-devices.html
That one day they will harvest my brain and let it live a vat of dopamine
Just a happy brain in a happy jar
Turbomuffins
JWST and what’s coming next
Turbomuffins sound like muffins with stimulants in them.
Internal alpha-therapy. Imagine attaching a radioactive atom to an antibody that would fix to a cancer, then as alpha radiation do a lot of damage, at a very short range destroy the cancer without doing much damage to the rest of the body
See that documentary for example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DkhSFS0FY4Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=8DkhSFS0FY4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Nuclear power reactors built after the 1970’s. New generation (5?, 6?) for baseload. Mox, msr, lead moderated… Renewables can bicker over the transient loads while reactors provide the ‘always on, always needed’ bulk of power load.
Fuel reprocessing to close the loop would be the grail at this point.
It would be nice to not need to worry about having a safe power source. Working remote, power blackout kills my ability to do my job
more single use plastics and pesticides, personally
I always find stories about carbon emissions exciting. The reason why a Malthusian view of things hasn’t panned out in recent centuries is because of technology. I am always interested in if humans can find a breakthrough technology that basically does something with carbon emissions that could eventually be done on a scale to reduce climate change. Unlikely, but fun to imagine.
Here’s an example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240111113214.htm.
I believe I have also seen efforts to convert carbon emissions to hydrogen.
Stuff around making clean water from bad water sources is also pretty cool.
Just saying, you included the last dot in the url so it doesn’t work.
Nuclear fusion. The Starship rockets. If they ever cure cancer.
