Other than AI, what technology are you excited about?

lab meat will be the norm for future generations

At that point, scientists might as well invent a way to produce concentrated nutrients.
- Eat your pills Morty
- From air to your plate: tech startups making food from atmospheric CO₂
- But then I want those drip-on perfect-emulation flavor drops from Shadowrun with my Nutrisoy!
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.

Anything decentralized and open source.

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

What about FOSS decentralised webpages, would that pick your interest?
- Very much
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
- Yup, that's why I'm very excited about it

Regrowing teeth

Growing extra teeth
- Cause why not right haha
Good news, there's a trial starting soon.

Although they can't guarantee the number and location of teeth regrown.
- I'll take two scoops please

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

Reversible Computing

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?)

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.

I don't think fusion has any chance of being widely deployed by the time that becomes an issue.
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?
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.

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

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=8DkhSFS0FY4

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Computing at the edge.

Reduces the need to send everything to the cloud and maintains privacy.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Nuclear fusion. The Starship rockets. If they ever cure cancer.

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

Who's excited for ai???

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.

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
- Mulvad too are rolling out "quantum-resistant encryption" (read: they add another random key after the first key handshake is established)
  
  https://mullvad.net/en/blog/stable-quantum-resistant-tunnels-in-the-app

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

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 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.
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.

Quantum safe cryptography ciphers already exist

Holographic displays

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

I have a few.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

I

few.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Thanks Pipey.
thanks
- You're welcome

Interaction net parallel computing (see HVM by HigherOrderCo)

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

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

Just a happy brain in a happy jar

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