Other than AI, what technology are you excited about?

MidnightBanjo@lemmy.zip to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 68 points –

For me it’s quantum computing - especially considering its impact on most current encryption methods

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lab meat will be the norm for future generations

At that point, scientists might as well invent a way to produce concentrated nutrients.

From air to your plate: tech startups making food from atmospheric CO₂

How would that work? Surely one periodic table chemical couldn't singlehandedly convert itself into all the nutrients the body needs.

You're right, you can't. You need some additional stuff. Plants takes both CO2 from the air but they also need for instance nitrogen from the ground. Now, of course 80% of air is nitrogen but it's bound up in an extremely stable state that plants can't really use. It takes too much energy to break the bond. If we could find some way to extract nitrogen cheaply from air though, it would be a real game changer.

Why not just eat the plants?

Well plants do other stuff than only produce food, so I guess the idea is that it might be possible to produce food more efficiently than a plant does, which isn't that far-fetched.

So it's not "don't eat plants" as much as "look, we made this bacteria that can produce a vegetable-soup with slightly more calories per energy input than a carrot".

honestly, just give me a sumptuous bean burger. I only eat kebabs because they're cheap and available, not because I crave meat like a vampire

I crave meat like a vampire.

then you gotta problem there, bud

my teeth shake only if it's there in front of me, otherwise I'm good

Anything decentralized and open source.

I'm really excited at the improvements made to gnome-mobile.

self hosted services that automatically and safely scale to global p2p services is about to happen

Any information about any of those things? I'm quite interested!

I'm the creator of a network protocol (and working implementation :-) that is based on self hosted nodes, that let's you share/link to whatever data, say a html page, a video etc. Encrypted, overshared (so your node doesn't need to be up for your data to be accessible), and decentralised. Based on reciprocal sharing so no money or luck involved.

I'm being bad at promoting it would be an understatement, I would love just contributing to all this obviously coming decentralised sharing.

Cheers

There has been a few attempts; zeronet and one from bittorent themselves that was dropped (I wonder what happened to that).

None of them have been used to create the killer app that has inspired the required network effect for mainstream usage. I guess finding the magic architecture that works and becomes sticky is the key. There are so many ways to do it!

Reversible Computing

In theory, we could make computers consume orders of magnitude less power, enabling extreme miniaturization of systems.

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.

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?)

RISC-V and getting even more low power+max performance

Not sure if anyone here would say AI regardless of the title, but for me it would have to be nuclear fusion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Your correction is a bit confusing as you said "fusion" three times and "fission" zero times.

I mean Fission - Fusion is also exciting but still a ways off... Fission is usable today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Internal alpha-therapy. Imagine attaching a radioactive atom to an antibody that would fix to a cancer, then as alpha radiation do a lot of damage, at a very short range destroy the cancer without doing much damage to the rest of the body

See that documentary for example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DkhSFS0FY4

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.

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.

Not initially. With new disruptive tech, a new un-cornered market arises where companies are so desperate for their initial customer base that customer incentives and company goals are wholly aligned.

It's only when the competition peters out or when the startup money starts demanding an immediate return on it's initial upfront investment that company incentives and customer incentives drastically diverge.

I always find stories about carbon emissions exciting. The reason why a Malthusian view of things hasn't panned out in recent centuries is because of technology. I am always interested in if humans can find a breakthrough technology that basically does something with carbon emissions that could eventually be done on a scale to reduce climate change. Unlikely, but fun to imagine.

Here's an example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240111113214.htm.

I believe I have also seen efforts to convert carbon emissions to hydrogen.

Stuff around making clean water from bad water sources is also pretty cool.

Just saying, you included the last dot in the url so it doesn't work.

Efficient apps, everywhere. For example the COSMIC desktop is 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.

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

Just remember that when it first comes out, it'll probably by a buggy mess and need time to develop

Longevity research, it has really taken off in the last ten years, hopefully we're on some cusp for multiple breakthrough in the next ten years.

Atomically Precise Manufacturing but it's hard to find information about it.

personally, I have no desire to live longer than I'm intended to. living to that age with more vitality, however, that sounds great!

Well that's the idea, repair the damage and be youthful instead of aging and becoming an old crippled person.

You're thinking of Geriatrics; the study of making people old longer. Longevity is making people not get old in the first place.

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

Zero knowledge and multi-party computation, and technologies that allow, like TLS Notary and proof of email

I tried the Meta Quest 2 and felt it was pretty awesome but I felt sick within minutes of using it.

So something like that without the sick would be revolutionary.

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.

Fusion? That would be big. The continual role out of green energy which can push the price down. The McRib coming back. Normal things.

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 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.

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.

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

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Differentiable programming. Differentiable ray tracers for example can be used to reconstruct the geometry of something you took a picture off.

That one day they will harvest my brain and let it live a vat of dopamine

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.

It would be nice to not need to worry about having a safe power source. Working remote, power blackout kills my ability to do my job

Interaction net parallel computing (see HVM by HigherOrderCo)

E and S band fibre data transmission. 300+ terabit speeds using fibre already in use

It's very far thou, like 2040 type of boom technology

Turbomuffins

JWST and what's coming next

Turbomuffins sound like muffins with stimulants in them.