What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
we need teleportation frankly
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Flying cars
Nah fam, I'm good on that one. I see enough carnage on the roads with normal cars.
Yeah, flying cars are even worse than land cars. Imagine how much less efficient parking and take off would be. Imagine all those cars circling the sky waiting to park. Would we need to cut down all the urban trees? Would we build even bigger parking lots? Huge runways and landing pads everywhere? It sounds like hell.
It sounds like hell.
Another good point. Ever heard a helicopter land? That's what flying car highways will sound like nonstop
But at least in an emergency they’ll always land on their tyres.
Also imagine ending up in a car crash when you're like, 100 metres above the ground.
Then again, self driving cars would be much safer off the ground. None of that 'which pedestrian should we run over' ethical dilemmas that car industry moral philosophers and actuarials currently grapple with.
Which pedestrian should we crash on is the new hot debate.
The Trolley problem doesn’t go away in the air (not that it’s that big of a deal to begin with). In fact, it might even be worse. Your car is falling. Do you crash into the crowded street or the crowded building? Which one? The destructive potential is much higher. If safety is really a concern, don’t you worry about giving every person a missile?
Flying cars “solve” a non-problem, because long distance highway travel is already the least dangerous. Most accidents are at intersections and points of conflicts. But eventually flying cars need to land and be near other cars and people. There will still be traffic jams, vast fields of parking lots, and cities made uncomfortable to actually walk or exist in.
Both of these things can be true. I said it would be safer, you say that when there is trouble, it'd be a much bigger trouble. However, crashing with a rolling car would be a much more common occurrence than with a flying one, where it would basically only happen as a catastrophic malfunction. Nobody would walk out unexpectedly in front of a flying car.
"Which building do I fly into"
I bet if flying cars happen people will not be piloting them. They'll act more like personal train cars, joining others in orderly movement
Maybe a bunch of people could share one big one, like some kind of flying bus.
You mean sit in the same vehicle as you peasants?
Preposterous!
/s
With flying cars we'd have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.
Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we'd take these two ton death machines and say "let's put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from"? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.
The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it's a completely different scenario. And that's what we'd have with flying cars. At least I hope so!
I would honestly hope we would be smart enough not to go the road of the car again but instead invest in good public transportation, at least in cities and other densely populated areas. Flying cars, even automated, would be a terrible idea from both risk and energy/climate change perspectives.
flying cars it is then . . . I'm sure tesla is working on it already.
Teleportation is just a high tech suicide booth.
That's a matter of opinion.
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No. Since it is impossible, any discussion on it is just speculation. You are saying it is a high tech suicide booth based on how it is portrayed in Trek...Which is fiction.
Same with time travel.
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What if physicists find a way to bend space such that you'd be able to move instantly (through some sort of portal) between two extremely far places while staying at a normal speed?
Just because quantum teleportation has "teleoprtation" in its name, doesn't mean it's the only possible form of it.
Don't blame others for arguing without thinking if you haven't given it proper thought yourself.
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You have really strong opinions on this considering most of this is purely theoretical.
AFAIK no wormholes were ever observed or created, and there are many theories on how they maybe created (artificially or naturally) and/or traversed.
Also, any I think any reasonable person would say you teleported if he saw you going through a portal.
We also don't understand consciousness, so no one really knows what happens when you use a 'suicide booth' like you imagine. Maybe it's even possible to just teleport your consciousness too.
You really have no fuckdamn idea how long I have been thinking about this exact subject.
Neither do you.
See, that's the problem with modern science reporting. People are so easily confused.
No. We have never teleported atoms.
We did the equivalent of a fax machine.
We took an atoms current state, sent that information down traditional communication lines, and copied it's state perfectly to another atom.
They call it Quantum Teleportation, but it has nothing to do with Sci-Fi teleportation as most people think of it.
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Ok I have come to realize that lemmy is literally no better than reddit when it comes to people who are so arrogant in their ignorance.
Or the common denominator is you're clueless.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/645/713/888.jpg
Don't be mad, it's gonna be ok.
No, philosophy.
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Your arrogance is staggering. Is science not also a form of philosophy? And anyway, it's not a scientific 'fact' that your consciousness will do anything at all, the hard problem of consciousness is not yet solved.
No science is not a form of philosophy. One is based on logic from priors or argument over Ordinary Language and the other is based empirical data. They have vastly different approaches and achieve vastly different goals. I am not going to ask a scientist the proper way to live and I am not going to ask a philosophy department head to explain momentum.
They might help each other, on occasion, but healing each other does not mean one is a subset of the other.
I hate to break it to you, but philosophy is both the rational (a priori) approach, and the empirical (a posteriori) approach.
The scientific method, whilst very useful, is still the empirical method with certain postulates.
The scientific method, whilst very useful, is still the empirical method with certain postulates.
It really isn't. The presumption argument requires that you are a mind reader and can be 100% certain that you know what unstated priors a person is operating under. If they deny them, you mere reassert it. It is a non-falisifable claim. Thus the attempt to disprove science required a return to faith.
Fish do fine and know nothing about water. Birds fly and don't understand aerodynamics. The vast majority of life in existence conducts energy production via ATP and only a small fraction of the human race has understood that. Fireflies don't know that they are doing the most efficient form of light production from chemicals ever found.
The whole presumption apologetics argument is a garbage heap only advocated for by people who value faith over experimental methods. A false attempt to sub in a bad contextualization from the things itself. You don't need to have a fully worked out from first principles understanding of the universe to conduct a basic experiment. It might be helpful, maybe, but it isn't required.
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Yeah I'm with you on this. Even from a pure science fiction perspective there's just no way the experience of consciousness "transfers" by any currently understood science.
Just like when you move a computer's file across the Internet the result would be a copy, and that wouldn't really be noticable or impactful to the copy or the people who know you and the copy would interact with, but it would make a hell of a lot of difference for the person going in. Great if you're dying and want to do what you can (The Culture book series covers this possibility quite well) but otherwise small comfort.
Best case scenario is "The Prestige", but with a much quicker and cleaner death.
And if someone slaps "quantum entanglement" on the table like that is a real answer for anything, imma not even bother.
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That's okay, you won't understand it.
If there is a distinction there should be a difference. Given that a teleported human is indistinguishable from the prior non teleported human there is no difference and thus no distinction.
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Yeah you repeatedly have stated that. Could you maybe respond to what people say instead of endlessly reasserting your position?
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No.
Consciousness can be thought as software running on hardware (your brain). You do not destroy software by destroying hardware.
Whether you agree with this or not is not relevant to this discussion, since my point is that whether the above statement is true belongs to philosophy, not to science.
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Again, what we engaging is a philosophical discussion. And it is not a metaphor, it is analogy.
And while the map is not the territory, the question is what consciousness is. Is it the territory (brain) or the map (software)? It is very easy to argue that AI gives us a good indication that consciousness might appear somehow in AI systems too at some time, and there, there would be no question that it is a software.
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Once again, ANALOGY, not metaphor. It is not just a figure of speech, but direct comparison.
Of course, analogy does not prove a thing, however, all we are discussing here with you is not science, but philosophy. Is consciousness a structure which is upon substrate, or is it the substrate itself? Are you information or a physical body? These are not scientific questions, science can only answer how exactly the processes in the brain go, but it cannot explain the subjective feeling of “me”. Nearly by definition, - science deals with objective reality, not subjective perception.
Flying cars. We have the tech already.
Yeah, they're called helicopters and we rightfully regulate the shit out of them because flying without proper certifications and inspections is extremely dangerous for the public. Because when one idiot crashes, it won't only be him going out, but he will cause destruction and carnage on the ground.
Star trek teleportation is a suicide booth, but wormholes can do the same thing. Just bend space to bring two points together, step through the hole and unbend. Teleportation without disassembly.
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Medicine is a huge emerging field right now, and there's so much potential for benefit from humanity depending on how well we can govern this new tech
- smart drugs / treatments specific to a patient's genetics
- on site genome testing during infections
- gene therapy
- organs & prosthetics
- detailed monitoring (while relatively non-invasive) in intensive care, notifying HCPs early before issues develop
- very fast vaccine development
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