Ask Lemmy

AI, Mass Surveillance and privatization of services people need to live and National security technology

Maybe like super-thin phones and foldables/rollable phones. Most people have no need or use for them tbh

Cinema movies in 3D with the stupid glasses.

Ground-rolling cars as mass transportation. The engineering superb, but the technology inherently can't scale. The storage requirements alone push many cities past the limits financial sustainability, and the spatial requirements for operation lead to massive network congestion as a matter of course. And yet, we keep throwing good money after bad trying to make the system work.

Tablets have had a couple of "waves". They've never really gone away, but also haven't really become the norm, either, not in the larger-than-a-current-smartphone sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer#Early_tablets

Don't believe the ads. They are just trying to hype something that is too early for its time.

VR tech can, and it will, revolutionise gaming. It's just a question of when. Headsets are too heavy and require wires which impedes movement. VR glasses are developed by big tech and are perfect for privacy invasions, plus their batteries don't last anywhere near long enough.

Smartphones had already been invented nearly a decade before iPhones came out, but they were too early. The tech wasn't ready. Look at where they are now. Solar panels were invented nearly a century ago but didn't take off until then entire supply chain and manufacturing chain was built nearly 80 years later. The friggin helicopter was invented centuries ago and so were planes. You will find countless other examples.

Right now, we're trying to make it possible to conceive children without any sex and to grow them in external wombs. This has been a quest for decades and we might not see it bear fruit for a few decades more.

Just because they have failed so far doesn't mean they will always be failures. Every failure narrows the problem space to points of success.

Flying cars.

The flying car, AI, cold fusion, anti-aging.

The hype around biotech. It has been around for 40 years, and the next big thing is just around the corner, but progress is always much slower than all predictions. Nuclear fusion will be available in ten years time; I’ve heard that in 1970, 1980, 1990 etc etc. Conquering the solar system, the universe - perhaps in 1000 years?

vr is useful but its too wrapped up in corporate bs to really take off for now. its dominated by companies obsessed with ai and by pathetic startups that never finish a product. it just needs meta to be less dominant.

Perpetual motion
Cold fusion
Flying cars
Teleportation
Heavy-lift dirigibles

Centralised social media

I'm long-term bullish on VR, if you mean having a HMD designed to provide an immersive 3D environment. Like, I don't think that there are any fundamental problems with VR HMDs, and that one day, we will have HMDs that will probably replace monitors (unless some kind of brain-computer interface gets there first) and that those will expand do VR, if dedicated VR headsets don't get there first. Be more portable, private, and power-efficient than conventional displays.

But the hardware to reasonably replace monitors just isn't there today; the angular resolution isn't sufficient to compete with conventional monitors. And I just don't think that at current prices and with the current games out there, dedicated VR HMDs are going to take over.

I do agree with you that there have been several "waves" by companies trying to hit a critical mass that haven't hit that point, but I think that there will ultimately come a day where we do adopt HMDs and that even if it isn't the first application, VR will eventually be provided by those.

Home printers