For me it’s quantum computing - especially considering its impact on most current encryption methods
Turbomuffins
JWST and what’s coming next
Turbomuffins sound like muffins with stimulants in them.
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
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 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.
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.
Regrowing / regenerating certain body parts.
This could theoretically be done with stemcell stuff, but it’s not there yet. However, when we finally reach the point where we can infinitely regenerate our body cells, we’ll become effectively “ammortal”; unable to die due to natural causes (such as illness), but we will still die from other people (for example, a bullet to the head)
Besides that, I think nuclear fusion would be an incredible development if we can finally harness it to power our homes.
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
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.
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.
Excited and scared for quantum computing
Yeah, my understanding is the NSA stores all encrypted texts they intercept so when they can get a good quantum computer they can break them.
Glad groups like signal have started updating their encryptions to help handle that
Mulvad too are rolling out “quantum-resistant encryption” (read: they add another random key after the first key handshake is established)
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/stable-quantum-resistant-tunnels-in-the-app
Good to know.
The democratization of embedded programming and the capacities it offers. Coupled with 3D printing you can build your own robots or machines with minimal knowledge and money.
Nothing. I’ve learned that anything capitalist media gets excited about is always going to fucking suck for everyone the instant it comes out.
I know that’s a cop-out answer so i’ll point out that sodium ion batteries are rolling out and it’s causing prices to drop, which is great.
Sometimes we get immediate benefits. It took a while for capitalism to take over the Internet.
That was then, this is now. Now shit goes bad before it even comes out.
I was looking forward to Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT before they became digital plagiarism before even releasing to the public. I even had use cases lined up and now it’s just become so radioactive that I refuse to use it even for its genuine and non-abusive purposes. Didn’t help that generative AI field actively killed one of the AI-powered (not machine learning) tools I was using. Good thing I had a copy.
It had so much potential but all it did was fuck up the ecosystem, enshittify itself and then poison the well for everyone else.
Fusion. I think it’s our only hope of making it through climate change without massive losses.
There’s a massive fusion reactor in the sky that we could easily use by turning the radiation from it into electricity or harnessing the winds that are caused by the temperature differences it creates.
Nuclear fusion still has a long way to go, but to slow climate change (already too late to stop it) we need to act now.
I don’t think fusion has any chance of being widely deployed by the time that becomes an issue.
I agree with this. The extreme weather keeps getting significantly worse YOY, and a recent extreme temperature spike in the antarctic has scientists worried that our timeline is a lot shorter than previously estimated, which means significant action needs to be soon.
We are making excellent progress with fusion, especially the recent development to use AI to keep the magnetic fields containing the reaction stable, but how long will it be before we have a material that is strong enough to withstand the heat of a literal miniature sun for the years at a time required to run a plant? Just the energy from the magnetic field is strong enough that they’ve developed a super efficient was to use those microwaves to bore holes through the earth’s crust hundreds of times deeper than ever before. So we have to at least come up with something significantly stronger than the pressurized material 2km deep into the earth’s surface.
I am and will remain on the fusion bandwagon, but putting all of our eggs in that basket is a baaaad idea with the current state of things. On that note, that crust-boring technique i mentioned should make geothermal much more viable.
Honestly, I would consider it too late if it ready to build the first commercial plant right now. Building one of those takes a decade or two and building them all over the world takes significantly longer as expertise doesn’t pop up out of nowhere in as many people as you want and neither does funding happen for plants all over the world as the first one isn’t even finished yet.
Regrowing teeth
Growing extra teeth
Cause why not right haha
Good news, there’s a trial starting soon.
Although they can’t guarantee the number and location of teeth regrown.
Zero knowledge and multi-party computation, and technologies that allow, like TLS Notary and proof of email
In theory, we could make computers consume orders of magnitude less power, enabling extreme miniaturization of systems.
I still don’t quite get what this is. From what I’ve just read it’s transistors with zero heat dissipation caused by zero-ing out the RAM.
So okay, we have perfect RAM which never needs to be zero’d out, and 1 can be easily be reversed to a 0 if we know the operation that yielded it… but what is the actual computational benefit here?
For a computer to have reversible RAM, doesn’t that mean we would need to store more computation in order to roll back operations (and again, why would we want to?)
When I was learning computing on the electron level I was floored just how much electricity is wasted being converted to heat turning a 1 into a 0 and theorized that a system which would knock electrons around rather than just erasing them, cool to see it’s becoming a real thing.
I guess we can look forward to superconducting Light Emitting Capacitors that have 100% efficiency, with the unideal component being centralized on a thermoelectric unit to capture waste heat, since that was the other thing that I was successfully theorizing about at the time.
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.
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
more single use plastics and pesticides, personally
Not sure if anyone here would say AI regardless of the title, but for me it would have to be nuclear fusion
