Ability to live in balance with the earth
I thought we would be able to redo our dna in adults using viruses or other vectors completely. Where we are now I thought we would be in like 2010. So we are making progress but I thought we would be farther along and genetic disease would be a thinf of the past.
Hoverboards.
I think the self tightening shoes would have been doable. But we still didn’t get those.
Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets
Really fancy guillotines, with Internet Access, Bluetooth, and AI, of course.
“I’m Alan, your Virtual Execution Assistant. I can offer you a choice of a Last Cigarette, or Last Words, which would you like to choose?”
Good music. Why does music in the 21st century have to suck so bad? It’s not that much different than what we had in the 20th century, the quality just steadily decreased instead of increased. It’s all divas screaming, really boring rap, or just dull, art-less rock.
Today, even young people are discovering that the Classic Rock era had very cool music. It would have been like my generation discovering the music of the pre-war 30s.
I like music from the decade before my birth and swing became big at one point and many folk discover there is a lot of classical music they like. I get what your saying but like there is a lot of historical crap pop to which is kinda always around.
Cool, I have a degree in Music History, and you are 100% correct, there is a LOT of bad historical music. Luckily, we don’t have to deal with it much, because most of it has been filtered out over time.
There’s a loose rule in all Art, that 95% of art is mostly mediocre. Only about 5% is worthy, and only about 1% is truly good, or great. When youre in the midst of it, most of what you are hearing is junk, and you have to be the filter, and it can be exhausting.
But if you go back to the old stuff, it’s basically been curated by critics and fans over the decades, and mostly the best stuff has survived, so it’s easier to find great, satisfying music.
And if you’re ambitious, you can sort through the debris, and find the odd forgotten classic rock gem, like Shoes:
Or Yaz:
Or Bread:
I wonder about that in the modern age though. I mean there has to be a factor of how easy it is to copy and store. So likely a lot was lost before performance recording capability. In the car I mostly listen to npr but when I don’t care for whats on I will just sorta jump between stations and there is a thing now for stations to kinda take a time period but they don’t seem to be very discriminatory about it. On the other hand now that we can call up any song we want likely you will see the cream come up to the top on what gets asked for a lot. I have one particular gripe though because my fav band tull had this album crafting they did where the position of songs, especially the first and last, were real important. They have these special editions they kinda just tacked songs on them and it ruins the flow. Its impossible, at least with amazon, to get the device to do the original vs the special edition that it defaults to.
Fusion lol.
Better space tech or at least a moon base.
Modular body parts like in cyberpunk
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It’s 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments…
I understand that it’s probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it’s still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
Something is wrong with the ones you’re buying, then.
Studies show that they do, on average, last dozens of times longer. Personally I replace them way less often than incandescent.
I suppose the earliest ones were worse and there are definitely garbage ones out there. And even good brands have a did here and there. And if you have poor/inconsistent power, or placing them in hot, enclosed fixtures, they don’t perform as well as they could.
I bought some on clearance about a decade ago, my wife thought I was crazy buying 20 bulbs, I gave 1/4 of them away and I’ve still not run out.
Who were the studies done by? Philips?
Oh that’s a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
This is common (engineered predictable fault.)
The Phoebus Cartel was objectively terrible, but it turns out there are perfectly good engineering reasons to limit them to 1000 hours. It has to do with the chemistry of tungsten. Those bulbs that last forever give off exceedingly little light, and the 1000 hour rule is from a standard that predates the cartel.
no hot filaments…
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don’t even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won’t exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling ‘boob’ light).
I’ve been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee’s basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I’m a pretty small sample size. I know I’m paying a premium for that approach, but it’s not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
I was there for the transition period between incandescents and LEDs: The CFL.
Buy dimmer, filament style LEDs. They don’t burn themselves out hy heat at least.
Otherwise you’re facing planned obsolescence.
Synthetic meat that’s actually edible/palatable
I think it depends on what you mean when you say “synthetic meat”.
I use quorn mince when I’m making spaghetti bolognese and lasagne. If you add marmite to the “mince” when you’re doing the initial cook the final dish is indistinguishable from real meat tbh.
I agree that other meat replacements aren’t the same and probably won’t be for a while, although Aldi have recently started selling something that resembles a steak which I want to try.
We have that already and I’ve eaten it.
Good synthetic meat exists, it’s just more expensive to produce so you usually can’t buy it at like a corner store or something
When I was a kid in the 80s I thought we’d absolutely have some kind of moon base by now. More space stuff in general. What is more “future” than space?
Green energy is maybe 10 years behind where younger me would have wished it to be, it feels we’re close to some big breakthroughs. I’m still hopefully to see some game changing things in my lifetime.
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Genetic-level diagnoses and treatments.
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Inexpensive, rapid genome sequencing.
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Commonplace genetic counselling for more than just pregnancy.
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Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
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Cloned tissues (i.e. blood, skin), organs (i.e. heart, lungs, kidneys) for transplant or repair.
I graduated university the same year the Human Genome Project first published completion. Certainly, that project uncovered more questions than answers.
Also, we’ve done an absolutely garbage job of becoming appropriate stewards of this technology. Primarily, today, it would be used to identify, segregate, subjugate, and eventually kill a portion of the population.
Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
I feel that for laws to exist, you first need some accidents to prompt the public outcry to get them passed. And accidents in genetics are going to be very messy indeed
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A cure for all diseases and illnesses.
You thought this would happen by 2026?
Realistically?
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Housing that doesn’t cost a fortune
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Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you
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Food that’s both affordable and worth eating
None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.
That’s not tech, that’s policy. Technologically there are no holdups to this, capitalism just needs it to not be so
Your answer is something you want to force into the conversation, not what OP asked.
You’re not wrong, but that’s not the conversation man.
Yeah, the reason we don’t have those isn’t technological. We could have it today if we collectively decided that we wanted it.
Well, that plus militant organizing
That’s not really how it works, or we’d already have them. People in China have those things because they beat the fascist KMT back to Formosa, and by force subordinated the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism.
As it is written in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra:
It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.
Recently quoted by Bruce Lee, than in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain
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Better general medical science. So much of what we use is very old tech. We still can’t regrow cartligage. We still pin bones together with titanium screws. We still mostly use fiberglass casts (though better alternatives exist). We still catch the common cold.
When I went to the hospital for a broken bone, I thought this tech was already there since tech was advancing so quickly, going from Pac-Man to Super Mario 64 in 16 years.
My vision:
‘At the very least I’ll get to see a 3D image of my broken bone and maybe there’ll be ‘dentist chair tools’ that can straighten and fill up the bone like a dentist does with your teeth. I mean, we advanced a lot in computer technology right?’The reality:
‘Here’s your 1950s X-ray picture. You see that Rorschach test blotch? That’s where it’s broken. We’ve done our job, have a good day!.. Your visit is over!.. You can leave now!..’That was 30 years ago.
The thing is, we could do that right now. But it’s more expensive and increases patient exposure to radiation and is just unnecessary. Right too for the job, if it ain’t broke etc.
I thought VR/AR would be farther along. There was a pitch 10 years ago that VR would be the “final platform” in that anything a phone, TV, tablet, or computer could do could be easily emulated in VR.
Unfortunately it’s still all walled gardens. Also nobody wants to wear that shit for more than an hour.
More specifically I thought one of the approaches to an omni-treadmill would catch on enough for an at-home model to be available to the public.
Brain implants are progressing, so I’m still hopeful to see full-dive VR in my lifetime. Also scared of how it will be enshtitfied.
Yeah… as amazing as full dive VR would be, I’d be afraid that weaponized would be a better term for how it would be implemented than enshitified.
Yeah, you coukd extend the social media reality bubbles ppl are living in to actual perceived reality. You coukd also block out homeless people and this hyper individuallism that it wouod enable would stop those kinds of problems from having any hope of being solved.
I thought we’d have affordable 8TB SSD’s.
