Ask Lemmy

Post scarcity society

Post capitalism.

We have automation for so much manufacturing. We have solar energy which is basically free after manufacture. We could spend a fairly small amount of time really working towards automating most resource extraction and processing.

We could have a really good standard of living not just in the west but globally and we could in the process resolve the threats of climate change but instead we have billionaires.

Hemp as a replacement for plastics and synthetic materials. Food packaging shouldn't have a longer shelf life than it's contents.

Sunchips was using PLA, which is a step in the right direction.

We could be solarpunk. Like, right now. With everything using clean energy and plants everywhere.

I think a moon colony was possible at minimum the mid 90's. I only think bureaucracy got in the way along with a very stunted space shuttle.

Public transportation.

Telemetry free consumer products would be nice

Socialized healthcare. A living minimum wage. UBI.

A permanent base on the moon. We should have had that 40 years ago, minimum.

Library economy.

Roof-top gardens everywhere! Like the launch arcologies in SimCity 2000. They looked cool as fuck.

the end of scarcity. that's a totally bogus concept that capitalism uses to keep the rich in power. we produce far more than the whole of humanity would need to feed and cloth themselves, and we have more houses empty than there are families. we could end poverty right now, we just choose not to.

Abolishing the concept of money. Probably won't happen but it would be pretty cool.

A moonbase.

I don't forking understand why in 2025, taking pills is still the only way for me to get better for some illness. As someone who gets pretty bad anxiety about taking pills and who sometimes almost chokes on them, I seriously can't understand how we have pocket PCs but we don't have a way to just treat things without pills. Hell, I'll drink something that tastes horrible if it means I don't gotta test my gag reflex.

Universal healthcare and living wages for everyone.

Arcologies.

Dense housing with good soundproofing, atop commercial space, in a walkable neighborhood.

Wouldn't need rent control if there was more houses.

I never stopped dreaming about flying cars, I just think it's not gonna happen because a crash would easily kill people just sitting in their homes.

Here is something we don't have that I think we could: Automated vegetable farming.

I've seen these watering gantries that are fixed at the center of a circular field and then rotate radially around that point to water the field. Could you use that as a rail with an effector arm on it that can plant, weed, tend, fertilize and harvest the field, such that in goes seeds and out comes vegetables? Without the liability of free roaming robotic tractors and combine harvesters. Surely the issue here would be software.

Socialism

Augmented reality overlaying historical photos and 3d models so you can literally see history as your walking.

Imagine being able to visit The White City that was built for the World's Fair in Chicago. Or seeing New York before sky scrapers dominated the landscape.

Only the things scifi wanted to warn us about.

We already live in dystopia timelie.

The viewscreen from Star Trek. It's actually real but nobody really wants to use it.

Phones, tablets, and laptops have had video chat for years. Apple brought it to actual TV a couple years ago. The idea is you use the Apple TV set-top box, and you get a squared-S-shaped clip that mounts an iPhone to the top of a TV so the rear camera array can point out into the room. You pair the two, and your whole TV turns into a viewscreen, just like on the starship Enterprise.

I've explained this to a few people and the reaction is usually "okay why TF would I wanna do that?" So imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas, or other "big family holiday" thing where you have that one person who won't participate because it's their partner's family's turn to see the kids or whatever... so, the Apple TV is like $100. And somebody is gonna have an iPhone. And these days, everyone has a TV, at least in the west, and they're 55" or bigger. So you get the TV in the corner of the room and you set it up so you're broadcasting the whole living room and maybe part of the kitchen or dining room, and you connect it to another family/part of the family who is doing the same. And your TV is now a window into that other living room, and people can go up to the screen and interact, or wave from across the room. Now if it's like Thanksgiving and it's based around eating, you could even run the end of the table up to the TV (so the TV is basically sat at one end of the table with no one in between) on both sides so when you look down the table, you're looking into that other room.

I would just like complete control of my various web things. be able to restrict banking activity by source (so like lock my savings to only move between my checking and no where else), be able to make temporary credit card numbers that I can not only limit the amount of a single charge but max total that can be charged and daily charge and monthly charge and also be able to limit it to one payer. So like I make it and use it to pay for something than can go back and click on the the vendor payed and say lock it to only that vendor. Have an investment account where I can setup a variety of investments by percentage and have it keep those percentages as markets move. oh and have a local location for all my things where you can get any help including for their website although thats not exactly technology.

Mech suits.

We have them IRL... Kinda. They're just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.

The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.

I'm confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that's featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.

I don't know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it'd be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.

How about a machine that can fold your laundry after it's washed and dried?