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List of emerging technologies
- K2h 14y agoThe whole head transplant[1] has got to be the most disturbing thing on that list. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant
- AkThhhpppt 14y agoI don't know; "Potentially marginalized technologies: Consensus reality" is pretty special....
- K2h 14y agoyou should see the movie eXistenZ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/
- toemetoch 14y agoDisturbing, yes. But keep in mind that there are warehouses out there with people's heads cryogenically frozen. So there's a line of people queuing up, waiting for it to happen. :)
- pyre 14y agoThat may be true, but I was under the impression that cryogenic thawing wasn't necessarily a foolproof operation. That would seem to be to be the first step.
- toemetoch 14y agoI was under the impression that cryogenic thawing has never been done on that level (human head).
- pyre 14y agoI've only ever heard of it being attempted on animals.
- K2h 14y agoevery time i hear cryogenics, i think of walt disney. i was surprised to find it is just urban legend. "A long-standing urban legend maintains that Disney was cryogenically frozen, and his frozen corpse stored beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.[102] In fact, Disney was cremated on December 17, 1966, and his ashes interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The first known human cryogenic freezing did not occur until January 1967, more than a month after Disney's death.[102]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney
- Symmetry 14y agoA much better article than I would expect, really. Coolest technology I had never heard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reconfiguring_modular_robot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reconfiguring_modular_robo...
- maybird 14y agoThis should be a great source of inspiration for any budding scifi author.
- DanBC 14y agoI haven't kept up with science fiction recently but I'd be surprised if most of these haven't already been written about. rec.arts.sf.* would be able to give book titles, authors, and probably page numbers too. It'd be interesting to keep the article to read it in 5 / 10 / 50 years.
- netrus 14y agoHere is a 4 years old version of the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_emerging_technologies&oldid=213596753 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_emerging_t...
- tocomment 14y agoI thought memristers were further along. Aren't they going to be shipping this year?
- joshuahedlund 14y agoWhy is "reducing air pollution" a potential application of driverless cars? The other benefits allow people to driver faster and safer on the same amount of roads, but I don't see how that would encourage less driving that would lead to less air pollution. Faster driving = less gas mileage, and if driverless cars dramatically lowers the opportunity cost of driving people may be encouraged to put even more miles on their car. Wouldn't that all increase air pollution? Don't get me wrong, I think the other benefits are enormous, but am I missing something obvious? Edit: Thanks for the great answers below.
- danielh 14y agoSelf-driving cars could form convoys to utilize slipstream. You could reduce the safety distance, because the reaction time compared to a human driver is massively reduced. Additionally, the driving style of the average driver leaves a lot of room for improvement.
- uvdiv 14y agoHow big are those slipstream effects compared to speed scaling? Drag power goes as the third power of speed; take average urban speeds from say 30 mph to 300 mph, and the drag goes up a factor of 1,000x -- to on the order of a megawatt.
- ajross 14y agoRelatedly, the same thing that gives you slipstream (lower following distances at a given speed) increases car density on the road at any speed, which increases road capacity, which decreases congestion and idling. My guess is that this effect, not the aerodynamics, is the biggest benefit. Also note that self-driven cars can park themselves and shut off the engine to avoid congestion instead of simply sitting in a slow-moving queue at a "metering light".
- Symmetry 14y agoIts quite true that driverless cars per se would have just the effects you mention. But if driverless cars mean that suddenly nobody owns a car and just rents a car from the automated taxi fleet when they need a ride we'd probably see most of them be lightweight single occupancy vehicles, meaning less pollution overall.
- winxordie 14y agoIt's interesting to note that GPGPU is on there but general-purpose computation on FPGAs isn't. It amazes me how the former has taken so much mindshare.
- grimboy 14y agoIt's interesting to note that history shows that in general the cheap and nasty, simpler, consumer level technology often wins over more seemingly more appropriate technology. In hardware for example, see Ethernet winning over other stuff around at the time and commodity PCs beating "big iron" for servers. I like FPGAs too though and am definitely egging them on, but winning may involve somehow smuggling them into something mass produced, which may be a problem since mass produced hardware will usually prefer an ASIC. We will see.
- tocomment 14y agoHave we hit a wall on increasing high temperature superconductors or is their graph out of date?
- Panoramix 14y agoThe graph looks accurate, there has been no real breakthrough since the copper oxides.
- adrianwaj 14y agoI'd love to see the space elevator come soon using carbon nanotubes. We could put nuclear (and other) waste on it and shoot it out into space. With such high costs in waste disposal, and how profitable such a device could be, you'd think it'd happen sooner rather than later. More exciting than the moon landing or the Facebook IPO!
- nsns 14y agoWhat, no teleportation?
- cletus 14y agoI'm actually excited about... fake meat. I think this has huge potential to reduce the amount of land and resources we need to use for agriculture. Of course, with that, will probably come an explosion in population... Any of the genetic/medical things will (IMHO) have annoyingly slow progress. The body is an incredibly complex system (duh), one I think that will defy efforts to "reverse engineer" is (so to speak). Put it this way: we need massive amounts of computing power just to figure out the shape of proteins, which is important to figure out what they react to and how. Extending that to figuring out the interactions and it gets even more complicated. I also believe that nothing will replace the convenience of (largely) non-volatile fuels to the point where considerable effort will be spent to make artificial fuels viable. Giant tubs of algae making them, fuel trees (Anathem), that sort of thing. As much as I like the idea of a space elevator, I'm not sure how viable it is. Firstly, just to create a material strong enough to withstand the forces involved is still something largely theorized about (buckeyballs notwithstanding). It will also be incredibly costly to produce. Imagine what acts of terror could do to that. I see the future of mass long-distance travel being underground vacuum trains. It's a huge engineering effort but would solve so many problems (eg air congestion, travel times). And as much as it depresses me I don't see a big future in space. The economics are terrible (particularly for interstellar travel). IIRC I read that getting one ton of spacecraft to the nearest star system accelerating to 10% of the speed of light would require roughly 10^18 joules of energy or roughly 1kg (being 0.1% of the total mass) of matter being converted to energy perfectly. And this assumes you've solved the reaction mass problem.
- ippisl 14y agoAnother way of replacing meat(and maybe reducing the price of food 10x and land and water use) , is using synthetic biology to manufacture the basic components of food and combine those to create tasty food[1]. The effect of this technology seem both really exciting,and really frightening(millions of the poorest losing their job). [1]http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5 http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5
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- ilaksh 14y agoWhy do people always think that this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex is far off? The lady with the arm has a 96 electrode implant.. you could probably type with that many electrodes. Seems to me its just a matter of getting more electrodes in there and/or doing more training in order to be able to interface with an exocortex. I think if people are less afraid of sticking things in their brains, things would look a lot more like a cyberpunk novel already.
- netrus 14y agoMy (tech/business) University has an obligatory seminar, where all students choose an emerging technology from a similar list and try to evaluate its path to reality, influence on markets and society, etc. We all were in awe when hearing the amazing stuff the other teams where working on – definitely one of the coolest classes I have ever taken!
- klbarry 14y agoI work for a company working on RFID (radio frequency identification technology on the wiki) for the jewelry industry. Some of the biggest wholesalers on the planet have recently bought our system and we have had requests for proposals from Rolex and more. We're currently looking for paid interns in NYC, feel free to contact.