Ask Lemmy

Photonics.

We are so close it's killing me.

I'm sure you'll get a bunch of respectable answers, but keep in mind that secretly, everyone is actually thinking sex robots.

Cultured Meat. Without relying on any major breakthroughs, a price competitive with "traditional" meat is feasible with a few rather reasonable and conservative assumptions and developments. Dropping cows as meat source globally alone might be sufficient to slow down further climate change significantly.

Nuclear fusion, right? That's got to be the big one.

Collective human intelligence augmentation = Computer-aided collaboration = Crowd thinking.
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

The Internet Archive - long term storage of as many books/films/music/journals/games as possible.

Liberate Ukraine 🇺🇦

Public education.

Trains.

Cryptocurrency.

Kidding! Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I'm sure that will ruffle someone's feathers for a fraction of a second.

Does vegan based meat/milk alternatives count as a technology sector? The moment we figure out a way to actually seriously imitate high quality steaks and 2% cow milk with it being indistinguishable and half the price I think that will hurt factory farming which is a bit of a domino effect that would lead to less co2 and methane produced, less agricultural effort wasted on feeding animals, that kind of thing.

Education.

I'm fairly certain that we could actually fully automate food production, and might even be able to automate each step from farm to distribution with a little additional effort. The major obstacle that I can tell seems to be the upfront cost of the precision machines necessary to handle harvesting, automating the planting and care has already been accomplished.

Anti- fascist tech.

it's called 'online deliberation' Here is a paper on what it might include: https://deliberation.stanford.edu/tools-and-resources/online-deliberation-platform

Here is my idea on how to implement it: https://www.theconsensusengine.com/ (I'd start on page 25 at the example section)

It's a way to get people to work together by finding common ground and making the internet a friendly place not a hateful one of conflict

It can reduce loneliness by bringing people together based on shared values and interests, as well as location, so you can find a community of people who like the same things, and find a community in your own community to make our localities stronger and more united.

it can be a way to stop and greatly reduce misinformation and the idea that it takes much more work to refuse lies than to make them, but keeping an list of arguments on both sides and letting the consensus based on evidence emerge

it can advance science and the knowledge base of all humans by creating a chain of trust with links, so reproducible things and empirical facts are are stronger and more impactful. This will help find answers in currently unknown directions while also reducing or eliminating the publish or perish model of science. If someone is found to have lied then all their contributions going backwards are effected so that the emergent consensus always works towards truth

it can force hypocrites like almost all republicans and religiousnuts to be faced with their own judgements on their own actions, based on how other people interpret their statements and evidence. This can show delusional people not only that they are wrong, but where they went wrong so they can be aware and try and correct it.

With a huge amount of money to create it and also to give away we can make people want to contribute and use the system because they stand to benifit from it

and it can act as an agora and planning department for all human kind on a multigeneration level where decisions are based on evidence and desire. this along may allow something like this idea to take ahold and be the source of progress for society into the future, because what we are doing now is not working.

Recycling and right to repair. If we could reclaim ~100% of raw materials in a useful way and avoid unnecessary waste it would have a big climate impact.

You know what? Fuck it. Let's finally build Edward Teller's Doomsday Machine.

Teller, the 'father of the hydrogen bomb,' wanted to build something even more mad, Project Sundial, a true Doomsday Device. It relies on the principle that there really is no upper limit to how big a thermonuclear weapon can get. As long as you're willing to keep chaining stages, you can make them arbitrarily large. However, you do eventually hit a limit where the bomb is too big to deliver to a target.

However, for Project Sundial, this wasn't a problem. The idea is you would build a single nuclear device so comically powerful that it doesn't matter where on Earth you set it off. You build the thing in bunker, under a mountain, in the heart of your most closely guarded territory. It can be the size of a large building if need be; it doesn't have to be movable. In extreme form, imagine a nuclear bomb the size of a stadium.

Once you push the button on this thing, it's over. No matter where on Earth you set it off, the explosion would be so large that it would launch enough dust and debris into the atmosphere to block substantial sunlight and cool the planet. Instant nuclear winter from a single device that cannot be intercepted or shot down. And you can built it in a bunker buried so deep that no regular nuclear weapon can reach it.

It is the apotheosis of mutually assured destruction. If you threaten our existence, we retain the power to destroy everything. The entire species would be reset to c. 1500 or earlier at the press of a single button.

They did actually design the thing, though it was never built. And the details are still classified as all hell. But it is entirely possible to actually, in the real world, build a Doomsday Machine worthy of any comic book mad scientist. It is possible to build a single device that can destroy the entire world at the press of a button.

Or hell, for all we know, it's possible someone has already built one...

Degenerative AI.

A new web browser engine that is not Google or Mozilla (like Servo) and a browser using this new engine.

Solar + Batteries

More complete alternatives to Apple and Google for telecoms devices.

AI to run companies in sustainably profitable ways that benefits their workers instead of rich greedy sociopaths.

Fusion

Medicine (i.e. research into cures for illnesses we can't cure yet) seems like just about the only thing that's worthwhile. Most of our modern issues aren't really about not having the right technologies, but about billionaires being greedy.

Tech Debt. So many of these companies investing in AI are doing so at the expense of out dated, broken shit that AI will never address.

System for default radical transparency by governments.

Give money to the artists the AI stole art fr.... I mean sex robots

Sex robots

Methods of updating energy infrastructure to accelerate the switch to renewable energy?