8 ms·

Five Technologies That Will Rock Your World

34 points by known 9y ago

Top19 9y ago
All of this stuff is cool and there is definitely support in both academia and industry for all of this, but I think predictions about how soon it will arrive are off-base by a lot. What if political and social disruption increases? What if the measures we’ve used to gauge progress over the last decade are all wrong because they were based on massive amounts of capital inflows from the Federal Reserve? I cringe typing this because I feel like some paranoid militia-person in the early 90’s, but still I think technological progress could easily be hindered as society looks to make social and political progress for a period of time instead.
nathan_long 9y ago
> The Flying Car Oh, sure. Why use enough just enough energy to propel yourself forward to your destination when you can also use a massive amount of extra energy to fight gravity the whole way? > capable of flying above congested roads... If flying cars became popular, this advantage would be destroyed by the congested skies. > will require a new kind of air traffic control Boy howdy. And create new categories of horrific accidents. Let's not build a world where a drunk driver can plow through the roof of a school, shall we? A more sensible answer to traffic is 1) more remote work and 2) better mass transportation.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Right, including flying cars for commuting damages credibility for me. For having fun, sure. For mass use, maybe if they were all under coordinated AI control. But otherwise, there's too much chance of horrific accidents. I mean, I don't even like driving undivided highways. And that's barely over 1D. 3D traffic? That's insane.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    There’s a lot more space in 3D and computers aren’t going away.
- no1youknowz 9y ago
  You kinda realise we are on a technical site right? This answer is wholly dismissive of where technology is going. How about the flipside? > The Flying Car New technologies such as metallic hydrogen are on the horizon. Coupled with better advances in battery tech, we may see the advent of a hybrid approach where VTOL is used via battery and propulsion with hydrogen. That said. Flying Cars may be mandated so that it's for use intra-cities or states. But then localised will be for autonomous driving. Having synergistic travel mediums will allow people to travel further and faster. Imagine having flying cars, hyperloop, autonomous driving and spaceX to combine to get you from A to B over a great distance in a matter of hours? All running on clean energy? More importantly, all AI driven without the need for human intervention? > will require a new kind of air traffic control Sure, AI driven. There's nothing wrong with having an AI that ensures cars fly amongst already agreed routes. > "Boy howdy. And create new categories of horrific accidents. Let's not build a world where a drunk driver can plow through the roof of a school, shall we?" How about No? How about having AI actually fly the car? We already have planes which go on autopilot for most of the journey. AI for flying cars should actually be a whole lot easier, than driving on the road. There will be no drunk driver, because there will be no stick. If you actually look at all the differing technologies that are coming out. Graphene, AI, Chemical processes, Battery Tech, etc, etc, etc. It's not difficult to see the next 5 or 10 years being a whole lot different to now.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    How about having AI actually fly the car? In other words, I'm not going to see flying cars in my lifetime, then? I mean, from my POV, that is some serious hand-waving, at least until we get some demonstrable AI in consumer products that's anywhere near what I'd trust to drive a car, let alone fly something.
    - no1youknowz 9y ago
      > I'm not going to see flying cars in my lifetime How old are you now? 20, 30, 40? Given an average life of lets say 80. That's 40 years. So much could happen. Are you serious? > at least until we get some demonstrable AI in consumer products that's anywhere near what I'd trust to drive a car Google started the self driving concept back in 2009. 16 years later, here we are. Also, that's half of what's left of a potential lifetime. Waymo is testing on public roads now [1]. Here's an article details the other competitors timelines [2]: GM: Rumors of self-driving vehicles by 2018 Ford: Truly self-driving vehicles by 2021 Honda: Self-driving on the highway by 2020 Toyota: Self-driving on the highway by 2020 Renault-Nissan: 2020 for autonomous cars in urban conditions, 2025 for truly driverless cars Volvo: Self-driving on the highway by 2021 Hyundai: Highway by 2020, urban driving by 2030 Daimler: Nearly fully autonomous by early 2020s Fiat-Chrysler: CEO expects there to be some self driving vehicles on the road by 2021 BMW: Fully self-driving vehicles possible by 2021 Tesla: End of 2017 Lets say, that all the manufacturers slip and it's only until 2030 that it's a viable consumer product. That's still 26 years it took to develop. Way way less than half a lifetime. Now if we extrapolate all that AI and knowledge and apply it to: [3] - Uber enlists help from NASA in bid to launch flying taxis by 2020 then [4] - [5] - [6] and probably more companies who are racing to make this a reality. Even if it took them 20 years to do so. You'd still see it in your life-time. ----- So please. I'd love to hear a rebuttal. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/google-waymo-announces-fully-autonomous-ride-hailing-service-uber-alphabet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/google-wa... [2]: https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline-for-11-top-automakers/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline... [3]: https://news.sky.com/story/uber-enlists-help-from-nasa-in-bid-to-launch-flying-taxis-by-2020-11119777 https://news.sky.com/story/uber-enlists-help-from-nasa-in-bi... [4]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/21/electric-flying-car-lilium-google-uber-vtol-jet-taxi https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/21/electric-fl... [5]: https://www.wired.com/story/delorean-aerospace-flying-car/ https://www.wired.com/story/delorean-aerospace-flying-car/ [6]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/17/flying-car-company-aeromobil-says-radical-concept-vehicle-will/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/17/flying-car-compan...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 9y ago
  Passenger aircraft use a lot of fuel because they are flying 10x the speed of a normal car. Low speed flight can use significantly less energy than driving somewhere. The advantages of only slowing down once and having a shorter trip end up being significant.
- patall 9y ago
  >> capable of flying above congested roads... >If flying cars became popular, this advantage would be destroyed by the congested skies. No, it will be destroyed by the noise these cars would make and hence will be forbidden in populated areas == where there are actually congested roads.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > Boy howdy. And create new categories of horrific accidents. Had this been the attitude 100 years ago, we would not be using cars. Why should we go from a horse that can walk me home itself without running into a single obstacle, ever, to a big heavy loud metal gasoline-burning machine that has mechanical failures, and requires constant vigilance from the driver?
- woolvalley 9y ago
  A low altitude automated 70mph 'fast hover ferry' that is as fuel efficient as a car would be pretty revolutionary. A lot of cases for bridges and the traffic choke points they represent would disappear in places like nyc, sf, seattle and others. People who live on islands could have fast and affordable ferry services to the mainland or other nearby islands. You could also create 'coastline subways' with such tech, but only need to maintain the ferry vehicles themsleves and docks vs road or train track infrastructure.
thisisit 9y ago
These things are so far off in the future that it is impossible to know when they will end up being useful. Back in 2013 I read this article: http://www.businessinsider.in/markets/the-8-game-changing-technologies-forcing-the-business-world-to-evolve/slidelist/21745899.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/markets/the-8-game-changing-te... I really liked the presentation where they not only talked about the technology but also looked at some data points. Since then I try to read all articles about world changing technology but most of them are fluff pieces gushing about stuff which might not happen in the short term. It is difficult to get good articles on this topic. Does anyone know any such grounded articles published this year?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Machine learning is already in use to aid radiologists and the flying car will still be a stupid idea in 20 years (barring low cost antigravity technology...), so the article is pretty uneven.
umanwizard 9y ago
Can anyone explain why the helicopter (which exists IRL) is not considered a flying car?
- snarf21 9y ago
  You can't choose when to drive it on wheels (slow but low energy consumption) and when to fly it (fast but high energy consumption) is the difference to me.
- kgilpin 9y ago
  Helicopters are loud, expensive to operate and maintain, difficult to fly, slower than airplanes, and crash more often. But, they are much more flexible in terms of where they can land. This “point to point” aspect is what people really mean by “flying car”. If you had a quiet, inexpensive, safe, self-flying, small helicopter then I guess you’d have a flying car!
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  You can't land a helicopter in the middle of a city. It's too loud, and moves too much air, not to mention the danger of the propellers.
revel 9y ago
This article is about revolutionary technology that we all expect will show up at some point, but when that will happen is uncertain. I don't think we're all that close to true conversational computing -- I think that would herald the dawn of true AI and we're nowhere near that. How close are we to quantum computing? Hype stories about quantum computing were a regular fixture for the better part of a decade but I haven't read one in a while. Are we significantly closer or did progress flatline?
pascalxus 9y ago
With a society that's still fighting to achieve the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarch of needs, the most meaningful types of innovation are: housing and transportation. Flying cars, or some kind of easy flying transportation would vastly benefit society: we greatly underestimate it. If you can triple the distance a person can travel in the same amount of time, you nearly 9-tuple your employment opportunities. Companies would have nearly 9-tuple the number of candidates. Unlike land based solutions, sky based solutions can go directly from point to point without needing to follow an arbitrary arc on the ground. And best of all, you'll have much more cost effective housing options. With housing being as bad as it is on the west coast, I bet people would pay big money to go farther and faster.
- Gys 9y ago
  Wouldn't flying imply a much higher energy usage then driving ? Because then weight is carried by the roads and only one directional force is needed ? And flying being faster implies even more energy because moving slowly is generally more efficient ? Especially on shorter distances I wonder how the energy needs compare for flying vs driving.
  - TylerE 9y ago
    Yes, however... Flying is much more SPACE efficient. With good computer control you could stack hundreds of "roads" worth of capacity vertically. Can save time (and thus indirectly energy) by flying directly from A-to-B. This is ignoring the time gained by the likely much faster cruising speeds, as well. Flying doesn't have to be THAT inefficien, either. Plenty of general aviation aircraft, especially slower ones, can achieve MPG that is really not that bad. The Mooney M20, for instance, cruises at 180mph and burns 10 gallons an hour - so 18mpg. Not bad given the speed! A car going that first will be consuming much more fuel.
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      To add to your last paragraph for folks who find this surprising: If you take a airplane and let the area of the wings go to infinity while taking their wing mass and thickness to zero, the vehicle would expend arbitrarily little energy maintaining altitude; it's basically a giant, extremely slowly falling parachute. Real-world wings do not achieve this of course, but not nearly as much energy needs to be expended compared during cruise as (say) simply hovering by pointing the engine at the ground (if your engine was even powerful enough to do that).
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
I found this fairly disappointing. > A.I. Health Care Actually near to affecting real customers. For some narrow tasks (e.g. melanoma detection) we can start to get the cost down to ~the cost of harvesting the tissue. More and more of these tasks could start to become cheaper and start taking more of the guess work out of Health care. > Conversational Computing Other than usable phone trees I haven't seen success here. Lots of work was poured into this last year and very little really lasted. > Mind Control The non invasive stuff just isn't that interesting and the invasive stuff is so far away from even the horror stories of early adopters. > The Flying Car If there isn't wide adoption then this is just a toy for the rich, maybe it could improve some emergent care situations if it's more usable than helicopters for hospitals. If there is wide adoption it's a public safety nightmare. Living with cars that are stuck to the ground is dangerous enough. > The Quantum Computer There are many extremely hard problems between now and quantum computers affecting people's lives beyond breaking RSA. Quantum computers aren't a panacea, they aren't better at every problem, they won't recreate the amazing doubling of power per cost that existed for most of computing history.
- DubiousPusher 9y ago
  Yeah, this is a pretty superficial grabbed from the headlines understanding of technology. For God's sake how can you leave off gene therapy. For three decades the hopes and dreams of nearly every person affected by an incurable disease have lingered on gene therapy. Now we're finally there. This year the first two treatments have been approved by the FDA with more in stage III trials and it doesn't even get a mention? Also, once you can watch TV while your car drives you, no one is going to care about the time savings of flying short distances. You'll probably be grateful that in the event of a rare crash you won't have the added 9.8 m/s/s of acceleration to worry about.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    Yeah If I was making the list it'd include CRISPR, GMO foods, autonomous vehicles and VR/AR (especially for mobility challenged people, if I were hospital bound I'd be clamoring for it)
- deleted 9y ago
Gys 9y ago
> What if Alexa was truly conversational, if you could have a back and forth dialogue? This will make our current social media options look like childplay. Its the end game of it all: Facebook, Google, Amazon as everybody's best friend. Why talk to other people ? The person that understands you the best is always with you. Always making jokes, telling good stories, making all these good suggestions on how to live your life and spend your money...
- 659087 9y ago
  If products like Google Allo took off with their "response suggestions", we could just stop talking all together and let Google have conversations with itself on our behalf. This seems to be the future these companies are aiming to drive us towards.
post_break 9y ago
I just want better bike lanes, better mass transit, and less dependence on planes to get around in the US. Those three things would rock my world.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > less dependence on planes to get around in the US Why? How?
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    Presumably high speed train.
CodeSheikh 9y ago
My money is on A.I. Health Care. It is not about displacing jobs of existing health professionals, but it will expedite the diagnostic process for many patients. For example, AI doing 70% of the analysis and a human technician gives thumbs up or down on. Fast forward 10 years and all of the analysis data aggregated can act as a continuous training model to improve accuracy. Because human anatomy is not going to change and AI analysis will get better with time. It is definitely an area worth considering for VC to look for investment opportunities.
personjerry 9y ago
If there's anything to take away from this article, it's that machine learning is the future. I feel like this articles says: 1. Machine learning for healthcare 2. Machine learning for language 3. Machine learning and brain-computer interface 4. Machine learning and flying cars 5. Quantum computing
cJ0th 9y ago
> Think of it this way: A quantum computer could instantly crack the encryption that protects the world’s most private data. How can they be so sure that no one uses symmetric encryption algorithms? I get that this article is meant for lay people but that does not make it alright to throw around false superlatives.
- goialoq 9y ago
  The article is complete garbage. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ "If you take just one piece of information from this blog: Quantum computers would not solve hard search problems instantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once."
bearbearbear 9y ago
You can't miss these thirteen clickbait titles that about one weird trick and the internet is going crazy over it right now!

34 points by known 9y ago

All of this stuff is cool and there is definitely support in both academia and industry for all of this, but I think predictions about how soon it will arrive are off-base by a lot. What if political and social disruption increases? What if the measures we’ve used to gauge progress over the last decade are all wrong because they were based on massive amounts of capital inflows from the Federal Reserve? I cringe typing this because I feel like some paranoid militia-person in the early 90’s, but still I think technological progress could easily be hindered as society looks to make social and political progress for a period of time instead.

nathan_long 9y ago

> The Flying Car Oh, sure. Why use enough just enough energy to propel yourself forward to your destination when you can also use a massive amount of extra energy to fight gravity the whole way? > capable of flying above congested roads... If flying cars became popular, this advantage would be destroyed by the congested skies. > will require a new kind of air traffic control Boy howdy. And create new categories of horrific accidents. Let's not build a world where a drunk driver can plow through the roof of a school, shall we? A more sensible answer to traffic is 1) more remote work and 2) better mass transportation.

mirimir 9y ago
Right, including flying cars for commuting damages credibility for me. For having fun, sure. For mass use, maybe if they were all under coordinated AI control. But otherwise, there's too much chance of horrific accidents. I mean, I don't even like driving undivided highways. And that's barely over 1D. 3D traffic? That's insane.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  There’s a lot more space in 3D and computers aren’t going away.
no1youknowz 9y ago
You kinda realise we are on a technical site right? This answer is wholly dismissive of where technology is going. How about the flipside? > The Flying Car New technologies such as metallic hydrogen are on the horizon. Coupled with better advances in battery tech, we may see the advent of a hybrid approach where VTOL is used via battery and propulsion with hydrogen. That said. Flying Cars may be mandated so that it's for use intra-cities or states. But then localised will be for autonomous driving. Having synergistic travel mediums will allow people to travel further and faster. Imagine having flying cars, hyperloop, autonomous driving and spaceX to combine to get you from A to B over a great distance in a matter of hours? All running on clean energy? More importantly, all AI driven without the need for human intervention? > will require a new kind of air traffic control Sure, AI driven. There's nothing wrong with having an AI that ensures cars fly amongst already agreed routes. > "Boy howdy. And create new categories of horrific accidents. Let's not build a world where a drunk driver can plow through the roof of a school, shall we?" How about No? How about having AI actually fly the car? We already have planes which go on autopilot for most of the journey. AI for flying cars should actually be a whole lot easier, than driving on the road. There will be no drunk driver, because there will be no stick. If you actually look at all the differing technologies that are coming out. Graphene, AI, Chemical processes, Battery Tech, etc, etc, etc. It's not difficult to see the next 5 or 10 years being a whole lot different to now.
- mikestew 9y ago
  How about having AI actually fly the car? In other words, I'm not going to see flying cars in my lifetime, then? I mean, from my POV, that is some serious hand-waving, at least until we get some demonstrable AI in consumer products that's anywhere near what I'd trust to drive a car, let alone fly something.
  - no1youknowz 9y ago
    > I'm not going to see flying cars in my lifetime How old are you now? 20, 30, 40? Given an average life of lets say 80. That's 40 years. So much could happen. Are you serious? > at least until we get some demonstrable AI in consumer products that's anywhere near what I'd trust to drive a car Google started the self driving concept back in 2009. 16 years later, here we are. Also, that's half of what's left of a potential lifetime. Waymo is testing on public roads now [1]. Here's an article details the other competitors timelines [2]: GM: Rumors of self-driving vehicles by 2018 Ford: Truly self-driving vehicles by 2021 Honda: Self-driving on the highway by 2020 Toyota: Self-driving on the highway by 2020 Renault-Nissan: 2020 for autonomous cars in urban conditions, 2025 for truly driverless cars Volvo: Self-driving on the highway by 2021 Hyundai: Highway by 2020, urban driving by 2030 Daimler: Nearly fully autonomous by early 2020s Fiat-Chrysler: CEO expects there to be some self driving vehicles on the road by 2021 BMW: Fully self-driving vehicles possible by 2021 Tesla: End of 2017 Lets say, that all the manufacturers slip and it's only until 2030 that it's a viable consumer product. That's still 26 years it took to develop. Way way less than half a lifetime. Now if we extrapolate all that AI and knowledge and apply it to: [3] - Uber enlists help from NASA in bid to launch flying taxis by 2020 then [4] - [5] - [6] and probably more companies who are racing to make this a reality. Even if it took them 20 years to do so. You'd still see it in your life-time. ----- So please. I'd love to hear a rebuttal. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/google-waymo-announces-fully-autonomous-ride-hailing-service-uber-alphabet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/google-wa... [2]: https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline-for-11-top-automakers/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline... [3]: https://news.sky.com/story/uber-enlists-help-from-nasa-in-bid-to-launch-flying-taxis-by-2020-11119777 https://news.sky.com/story/uber-enlists-help-from-nasa-in-bi... [4]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/21/electric-flying-car-lilium-google-uber-vtol-jet-taxi https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/21/electric-fl... [5]: https://www.wired.com/story/delorean-aerospace-flying-car/ https://www.wired.com/story/delorean-aerospace-flying-car/ [6]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/17/flying-car-company-aeromobil-says-radical-concept-vehicle-will/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/17/flying-car-compan...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Retric 9y ago
Passenger aircraft use a lot of fuel because they are flying 10x the speed of a normal car. Low speed flight can use significantly less energy than driving somewhere. The advantages of only slowing down once and having a shorter trip end up being significant.
patall 9y ago
>> capable of flying above congested roads... >If flying cars became popular, this advantage would be destroyed by the congested skies. No, it will be destroyed by the noise these cars would make and hence will be forbidden in populated areas == where there are actually congested roads.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
> Boy howdy. And create new categories of horrific accidents. Had this been the attitude 100 years ago, we would not be using cars. Why should we go from a horse that can walk me home itself without running into a single obstacle, ever, to a big heavy loud metal gasoline-burning machine that has mechanical failures, and requires constant vigilance from the driver?
woolvalley 9y ago
A low altitude automated 70mph 'fast hover ferry' that is as fuel efficient as a car would be pretty revolutionary. A lot of cases for bridges and the traffic choke points they represent would disappear in places like nyc, sf, seattle and others. People who live on islands could have fast and affordable ferry services to the mainland or other nearby islands. You could also create 'coastline subways' with such tech, but only need to maintain the ferry vehicles themsleves and docks vs road or train track infrastructure.

thisisit 9y ago

These things are so far off in the future that it is impossible to know when they will end up being useful. Back in 2013 I read this article: http://www.businessinsider.in/markets/the-8-game-changing-technologies-forcing-the-business-world-to-evolve/slidelist/21745899.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/markets/the-8-game-changing-te... I really liked the presentation where they not only talked about the technology but also looked at some data points. Since then I try to read all articles about world changing technology but most of them are fluff pieces gushing about stuff which might not happen in the short term. It is difficult to get good articles on this topic. Does anyone know any such grounded articles published this year?

maxerickson 9y ago
Machine learning is already in use to aid radiologists and the flying car will still be a stupid idea in 20 years (barring low cost antigravity technology...), so the article is pretty uneven.

umanwizard 9y ago

Can anyone explain why the helicopter (which exists IRL) is not considered a flying car?

snarf21 9y ago
You can't choose when to drive it on wheels (slow but low energy consumption) and when to fly it (fast but high energy consumption) is the difference to me.
kgilpin 9y ago
Helicopters are loud, expensive to operate and maintain, difficult to fly, slower than airplanes, and crash more often. But, they are much more flexible in terms of where they can land. This “point to point” aspect is what people really mean by “flying car”. If you had a quiet, inexpensive, safe, self-flying, small helicopter then I guess you’d have a flying car!
thomastjeffery 9y ago
You can't land a helicopter in the middle of a city. It's too loud, and moves too much air, not to mention the danger of the propellers.

revel 9y ago

This article is about revolutionary technology that we all expect will show up at some point, but when that will happen is uncertain. I don't think we're all that close to true conversational computing -- I think that would herald the dawn of true AI and we're nowhere near that. How close are we to quantum computing? Hype stories about quantum computing were a regular fixture for the better part of a decade but I haven't read one in a while. Are we significantly closer or did progress flatline?

pascalxus 9y ago

With a society that's still fighting to achieve the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarch of needs, the most meaningful types of innovation are: housing and transportation. Flying cars, or some kind of easy flying transportation would vastly benefit society: we greatly underestimate it. If you can triple the distance a person can travel in the same amount of time, you nearly 9-tuple your employment opportunities. Companies would have nearly 9-tuple the number of candidates. Unlike land based solutions, sky based solutions can go directly from point to point without needing to follow an arbitrary arc on the ground. And best of all, you'll have much more cost effective housing options. With housing being as bad as it is on the west coast, I bet people would pay big money to go farther and faster.

Gys 9y ago
Wouldn't flying imply a much higher energy usage then driving ? Because then weight is carried by the roads and only one directional force is needed ? And flying being faster implies even more energy because moving slowly is generally more efficient ? Especially on shorter distances I wonder how the energy needs compare for flying vs driving.
- TylerE 9y ago
  Yes, however... Flying is much more SPACE efficient. With good computer control you could stack hundreds of "roads" worth of capacity vertically. Can save time (and thus indirectly energy) by flying directly from A-to-B. This is ignoring the time gained by the likely much faster cruising speeds, as well. Flying doesn't have to be THAT inefficien, either. Plenty of general aviation aircraft, especially slower ones, can achieve MPG that is really not that bad. The Mooney M20, for instance, cruises at 180mph and burns 10 gallons an hour - so 18mpg. Not bad given the speed! A car going that first will be consuming much more fuel.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    To add to your last paragraph for folks who find this surprising: If you take a airplane and let the area of the wings go to infinity while taking their wing mass and thickness to zero, the vehicle would expend arbitrarily little energy maintaining altitude; it's basically a giant, extremely slowly falling parachute. Real-world wings do not achieve this of course, but not nearly as much energy needs to be expended compared during cruise as (say) simply hovering by pointing the engine at the ground (if your engine was even powerful enough to do that).

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

I found this fairly disappointing. > A.I. Health Care Actually near to affecting real customers. For some narrow tasks (e.g. melanoma detection) we can start to get the cost down to ~the cost of harvesting the tissue. More and more of these tasks could start to become cheaper and start taking more of the guess work out of Health care. > Conversational Computing Other than usable phone trees I haven't seen success here. Lots of work was poured into this last year and very little really lasted. > Mind Control The non invasive stuff just isn't that interesting and the invasive stuff is so far away from even the horror stories of early adopters. > The Flying Car If there isn't wide adoption then this is just a toy for the rich, maybe it could improve some emergent care situations if it's more usable than helicopters for hospitals. If there is wide adoption it's a public safety nightmare. Living with cars that are stuck to the ground is dangerous enough. > The Quantum Computer There are many extremely hard problems between now and quantum computers affecting people's lives beyond breaking RSA. Quantum computers aren't a panacea, they aren't better at every problem, they won't recreate the amazing doubling of power per cost that existed for most of computing history.

DubiousPusher 9y ago
Yeah, this is a pretty superficial grabbed from the headlines understanding of technology. For God's sake how can you leave off gene therapy. For three decades the hopes and dreams of nearly every person affected by an incurable disease have lingered on gene therapy. Now we're finally there. This year the first two treatments have been approved by the FDA with more in stage III trials and it doesn't even get a mention? Also, once you can watch TV while your car drives you, no one is going to care about the time savings of flying short distances. You'll probably be grateful that in the event of a rare crash you won't have the added 9.8 m/s/s of acceleration to worry about.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Yeah If I was making the list it'd include CRISPR, GMO foods, autonomous vehicles and VR/AR (especially for mobility challenged people, if I were hospital bound I'd be clamoring for it)
deleted 9y ago

Gys 9y ago

> What if Alexa was truly conversational, if you could have a back and forth dialogue? This will make our current social media options look like childplay. Its the end game of it all: Facebook, Google, Amazon as everybody's best friend. Why talk to other people ? The person that understands you the best is always with you. Always making jokes, telling good stories, making all these good suggestions on how to live your life and spend your money...

659087 9y ago
If products like Google Allo took off with their "response suggestions", we could just stop talking all together and let Google have conversations with itself on our behalf. This seems to be the future these companies are aiming to drive us towards.

post_break 9y ago

I just want better bike lanes, better mass transit, and less dependence on planes to get around in the US. Those three things would rock my world.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
> less dependence on planes to get around in the US Why? How?
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Presumably high speed train.

CodeSheikh 9y ago

My money is on A.I. Health Care. It is not about displacing jobs of existing health professionals, but it will expedite the diagnostic process for many patients. For example, AI doing 70% of the analysis and a human technician gives thumbs up or down on. Fast forward 10 years and all of the analysis data aggregated can act as a continuous training model to improve accuracy. Because human anatomy is not going to change and AI analysis will get better with time. It is definitely an area worth considering for VC to look for investment opportunities.

personjerry 9y ago

If there's anything to take away from this article, it's that machine learning is the future. I feel like this articles says: 1. Machine learning for healthcare 2. Machine learning for language 3. Machine learning and brain-computer interface 4. Machine learning and flying cars 5. Quantum computing

cJ0th 9y ago

> Think of it this way: A quantum computer could instantly crack the encryption that protects the world’s most private data. How can they be so sure that no one uses symmetric encryption algorithms? I get that this article is meant for lay people but that does not make it alright to throw around false superlatives.

goialoq 9y ago
The article is complete garbage. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ "If you take just one piece of information from this blog: Quantum computers would not solve hard search problems instantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once."

bearbearbear 9y ago

You can't miss these thirteen clickbait titles that about one weird trick and the internet is going crazy over it right now!