Other than AI ideally. I’ve long been fascinated by CRISPR.
Wanna hear about niche tech or anything y’all find fascinating
With home IPL (laser hair removal) being easily accessible now, I’d like to see other useful lasers developed for home use as I have a tattoo I’d like to remove.
I’m not particularly following this technology though, just moderately hopeful, which is as excited as I can get these days, that it’ll come along and be affordable before civilisation collapses.
(It’s not a tat of anything shameful, I just don’t like having to go outside or talk to people if I can possibly avoid it.)
Nuclear Fusion
This is the key to so much. Worried about Nestlé monopolizing freshwater? With nuclear fusion we can just take any old seawater and remove the salt. Worried about the war with Russia? With nuclear fusion we can become independent of all gas from Russia and cut off one of their biggest income sources. Lots of special materials are expensive because electricity is expensive - with nuclear fusion electricity is practically free. Over time we can get rid of any coal plants etc. that produce CO2.
with nuclear fusion electricity is practically free.
Like that’ll ever happen under capitalism.
Oh i recently read a bit about it but honestly. Not my field.
I just want energy to be transformed, I like solar but nuclear is where its truly at.
China has a lot of nuclear projects going on
Maser drills: https://newatlas.com/energy/geothermal-energy-drilling-deepest-hole-quaise/
In a nutshell, it’s a economically brilliant idea: take hand-me-down microwave(ish) spectrum lasers from fusion research, drill holes deep into the crust (leaning on the fossil fuel industry), then hook up the resulting steam to existing coal plants, so you don’t have to build anything else. The coal plant gets free geothermal fuel, they move onto the next site: everyone wins.
It’s taking a worryingly long time though. I hope it gets enough funding.
Oh now THIS is the kimd of answer I was looking for. Great explanation and a great topic. Thanks for that
Good!
At risk of sounding like a shill, NewAtlas is a great source for exciting upcoming tech. I find myself reading it more these days.
Gonna go take a look
It’s AI but a specific use case of AI: an android at home to take care of the housework. Cleaning my dishes, doing the laundry, vaccuming and putting stuff away where it belongs are obvious use cases. But also:
- Go through your fridge and throw away everything that has expired or gone bad.
- Take care of your cat while you’re away on vacation.
- It’s your personal fire fighter.
- It paints your house or does any kind of house maintenance.
- Let’s say you’re in the middle of playing a board game on your dinner table but need to put it away for the night. Ask the android to memorize everything and put it away. The next time your friends come around to play, it can place everything in exactly the same spot.
Possibilities are endless.
Yeah! I’ve been asking chat gpt to take care of my daughter every day and I’ve not heard her cry in months!
That is anything but specific!
I am excited for the tooth regrowing tech coming up. I’ve got some awful dental work that would be much better replaced by a real tooth
Ain’t no way. Havent heard if this!
I’ve been loosely following this for years. Great to see it getting close to the deplorable state.
spoiler
Pun intended
Also the eventual stem cell treatment for replacing damaged Inner ear cells
I think you got autoincorrected from “deployable”
Nice catch! Autocorrect is a pain…
I used to be excited for ai, and, let’s just say, that excitement has dwindeled due to recent events.
I’m scared that the same happens to CRISPR honest
The issue with tech is the economic model its under. I can imagine a million dystopian changes to society.
The doctor in China for example.
Hey maybe China starts creating soldiers with four arms and the us does too and you have a new arms race.
I’m studying biology and CRISPR is a crucial tool for a ton of research. So it’s already really useful!
Which recent events, out of curiosity?
well i guess it’s not too recent, but the A.I. boom kinda killed my interests I’ve had 7 years ago. i wish it would go back to its research phase.
Ah, for sure. That’s how I feel about cell phones. Haha
That’s how I feel about cell phones.
Linux phones might be able to do something about that, assuming they become good enough soonish. Perhaps usable Hurd phones will become available first.
It’s too late.
I mean, I hate how pervasive cell phones are in the culture. I wish we had 90’s tech and used pay phones so people could disconnect.
I’m old enough to remember when using computers daily went from a dorky interest to something the cool kids were doing (MySpace etc). Obviously, how the two groups approached computers was quite different. Even how they approached social spaces on the internet.
Idk, haven’t thought about it much but I remember being pretty depleted about being interested back then. The things I was learning with basic coding and stuff could now be done in a couple of clicks, the resources were now more scarce, and the space became filled with money-people interested in promoting their brand
Internal alpha-therapy.
Imagine, attaching a radioactive atom to a biological marker that fixes to a tumour, and deliver radiation at the very right place, rather than having to cross healthy tissues with radiation.
I mean that sort of thing is already a thing. For some cancers will will insert radioactive beads e.g. lover cancer (HCC)
Ok I’ve heard of this somewhere. It seems like theres a lot going on in medicine!
3D printed buildings and neighbourhoods.
The design implications are endless and including modular rough-ins for water, power, and HVAC, which would make design accessible to all. Get an AI engineer to test the design and a human engineer to double-check the results, and you can get printing.
Hopefully, the type of concrete is getting less specialized and more sustainable. If we can jazz up the exteriors, that would also help.
Manual typewriters. You did not precised the age of the technology in question!
Do you knew that there are an average of 1’800 parts in a typewriter? That it can print in two colors, with different margins, different interlinear space, tabulations and that some even have things like word count? It’s a marvelous and yet understandable piece of technology. Someone technically inclined can understand 100% of the working of a typewriter, nobody can understand 100% of a word processor.
No that’s good. Typewriter nerds are the nerdiest nerds I’ve ever met. Love it
California typewriter is a really neat documentary that scratches the surface.
On the long-term, none. In the short-term, FOSS no-code tools are finally allowing grassroot organizations to have self-hosted, customizable internal tooling without having to rely on devs or sysadmins. This has a lot of potential to overcome the failures of the last decades of hackerist unadoptable software.
Now I don’t understand this stuff very well. But I know I like everything FOSS. And I know I like self hosting. So this certainly sounds good
Any Foss no-code tools you’d recommend?
Baserow and n8n are good enough for me to use in a professional production setting. Nocodb could be good, but it has some very basic bugs and shortcomings that make it hard to use.
Appflowy is getting there, but I would give it some more time.
Appsmith is good, but complex. Worth investing some time into, but it cannot be picked up casually to play around.
trains. i know it isn’t particularly new technology, but i am still excited about it.
RISC-v
Just was in a talk of Jennifer Doudna. Thank CRISPER will cure many cancers in about ten years is incredible. Too bad it will be too late for my parents, but still.
To answer your question: phones and medical devices are incredible. Due to my moms pancreatic cancer she is a diabetic now. Her fingers can’t feel anything anymore due to all the piercing. But now she gets a new sensor on her arm and has continuous glucose readings. And she can apply that by herself. And I get warned if she has low sugar. This bus amazing.
Shootout to GlucoDataHandler, which does a better job than Abbott’s own app.
Jennifer Doudna talks about it sooo well. Check out her episode on the Ezra Klein show (podcast). https://pca.st/episode/12135fc7-b935-4daa-92c9-8b998cafae37
Sorry about your parents.
Oh wow my mom actually got diagnosed as diabetic just a few months ago herself. That sounds like a really useful tool to have.
Also check the pancreas if possible. It almost always is found too late. And my mom started with ‘just’ diabetics too.
Edit, I hope it’s nothing.
I feel it. At this point I just want revenge on the cancer that got my mom.
In response to you, have you seen GATICA it’s a great movie that shows clearly why that tech scares me.
I think batteries are super interesting, and sodium solid state batteries are a pretty huge innovation, but graphene batteries will be utterly insane if we can get there. Very interesting stuff.
Graphine being a single atom think sheet of carbon, which is dope!
For anyone else searching, the movie is spelled “Gattaca”.
Thanks! It’s been about 20 years now 😅
You can remember it because it’s the letters from the four nitrogenous bases in DNA: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
Any technology is cool if you look at it in isolation. I just can’t get terribly excited because I generally doubt they will be used in a sensible/humane manner.
Med tech is looking cool. It’s one of the few unambiguously good uses of AI. AI systems for reading scans, detecting disease, etc. seem like they could be used to make medicine faster, easier, and more affordable, but I have doubts that the tech won’t just be used to increase profit margins and somehow mess things up to benefit insurance company executives.
CRISPR/synthBio looks like it could do amazing things, but I have to wonder how long until things hit the sweet spot, intersecting democratization of powerful tools and destructive ideology, and lead some lunatic or group of lunatics to develop a society destroying bioweapon.
It’s hard to get excited about the development of a new power when you look at who’s likely to hold it.
One of my favourite modern writers is Ted Chiang. He has argued that the horror in science fiction tends to come not from the technology but the system that it exists in.
You might appreciate this: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway#.nq4zaYNr6