For me it’s quantum computing - especially considering its impact on most current encryption methods
thanks
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.
Efficient apps, everywhere. For example the COSMIC desktop are modern AND fast.
Not going to happen I don’t think not while hardware is cheaper than development costs
I disagree. But these improvements are often low level, so that Meta can save costs doing the shit they do
All well and good but at the higher end they’re writing applications in JavaScript and electron and using many times more system resources than C or rust, and it will always be cheaper for them to develop in higher level languages (especially when the performance problem can be offloaded on the user’s machine instead of their own servers)
This. I think laziness is a huge problem.
It’s not laziness it’s economics.
It’s cheaper for companies to have their developers spend less time developing in higher level languages and just throw more hardware at the problem than spend more money developing in a more difficult language
They aren’t concerned with energy or material efficiency, only financial
Only their own specifically. Our economy wants people to only care about themselves. Even though this doesnt make sense as polluting the earth will directly impact you.
Who’s excited for ai???
Perverted executives looking for an excuse to lay off their entire workforce.
Yep. And really just the media and general. Not to mention every company seems to market ai for something.
It’s cool tech, but it’s covered everywhere, that is why I wanted to hear what other tech people are excited for
Realistic Batteries. It’s holding back a LOT of things. A lot of technologies are solved, but just require power.
Semi-Realistic Room Temperature Super-Conductor.
If that can be solved, the power density and efficiencies would just be astronomical… It would absolutely destroy multi-billion industries overnight.
Way-Out-There-Stuff If they ever prove out an actual functional EmDrive-like thruster, that would absolutely open up space travel to our species.
Batteries are the big one. Can you imagine how many people (homeowners/renters) will go out and buy a tiny 100W panel knowing that even though it will fill a battery with energy very slowly, they can still bank on it for a week?
Right now we have batteries that can survive about a day, using a modern solar panel system with inverter (~1000€). Imagine when we have batteries that can store weeks of power.
solar
solar!
Not only on the large scale of things,
But even robots would be in wide spread use if it had a useable runtime.
Something like this, you’re good for 20min before it needs to charge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
But if you could pull that off where it runs for 8 to 12 hours before needing to charge? They would be used everywhere.
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.
Fusion? That would be big. The continual role out of green energy which can push the price down. The McRib coming back. Normal things.
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.
Zero knowledge and multi-party computation, and technologies that allow, like TLS Notary and proof of email
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.
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.
Nuclear Fission, it’s amazing how far the technology has come.
do you mean fusion? fusions the one that separate atomic nuclei that we’ve had since the 1940’s. fusions the one where atomic nuclei are combined, that make headlines when the reactors run for more than a few seconds
I mean Fission - Fusion is also exciting but still a ways off… Fission is usable today.
Your correction is a bit confusing as you said “fusion” three times and “fission” zero times.
Unlocking any energy conversion techniques for gravitons (not virtual gravitons, but those associated with gravitational waves). If we could produce them artificially, it would be a whole new ball game.
Computing at the edge.
Reduces the need to send everything to the cloud and maintains privacy.
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
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.
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’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.
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.
