Your Favorite Technology That Didn't Come To Pass

That's more of a textbook than a teacher.

They're talking about the sci-fi version, which is basically a specialized AI that has access to all that information.

If you've read The Diamond Age, the Primer is a good example.

No, I'm not. However, I am writing on it right now.

> Of course in reality it would be patented to hell.

Patents are not like copyrights. They expire.

Then of course in "developed" nations we could just eat less, eat better quality food, stop over producing food and pay honest prices for food items that are imported from the "developing" world.

There, no more need for a food pill.

Nah, you'd always get some greedy *%%!@bag who went back for seconds - and other people who decided they were pillarians and wouldn't eat them.

Considering the calories you actually need the pill would be denser than lead. Since its not lead I suppose you could use some sort of extremely strong microgravitational field to squeeze all of the required elements and configurations into the SIZE of a pill. But at that point using enough mass for that amount of gravity would create a micro blackhole, assuming of course you somehow manipulated the higgs field via whatever causes hypothetical anistropy in the physical laws of the universe to confer more mass than usual on the constituent molecules of said pill. You'd also have to use the aforementioned to stabilize the micro blackhole, as it would be small enough to evaporate via hawking radiation rather quickly under current, local physical laws. Because hawking radiation would of course transform it into matter not considered nutritious thanks to the particle/anti-particle pairing not producing the exact molecules that constituted the black hole itself. Not that it would be in the form of a pill anymore.

Anyway, barring this or some other very strange form of condensed matter physics I'm sure all the nutrition you'd need in a single manageable pill is going to totally be plausible.

Sure what a great way to basically destroy the economy. How many people would it put out of work?

  No more farmers. No farmers means no feed supply stores so no clerks, stockboys, drivers and cashiers. No farm equipment manufacturers so no salesmen selling the equipment, no factories producing the equipment so no assembly line workers, office staff, managers, and drivers. The collapse of the the manufacturers puts their parts suppliers out of business so no mangers, office staff, drivers, delivery staff, shippers, receivers, line workers there either.

Then we have the collapse of the restaurant industry. No more restaurants, so no cooks, chefs, dishwashers, busboys, waiters, and waitresses. No more food wholesalers and their drivers, warehouse staff, and office staff. No more food safety inspectors and health inspectors. No more food critics and cookbook writers. No restaurant equipment manufacturers so there goes all their factory staff, office staff, sales people, managers, delivery staff, drivers, parts suppliers, etc.

It would be disastrous, because delicious food, cooking etc. are part of our culture. Furthermore taste is one of our senses. To cut it of by not using it, reduces your life experience. All world food problems are based on bad resource management and bad habits. You do not need to eat meat every day for a healthy diet, you should not eat too much carbohydrates, sugars, and fat. If you do, this has negative effects. We all know it. Those who cannot stop should consider a behavioral therapy or if they eat to compensate for stress and other shit, they should get treatment for those conditions. And if your health care system is not able to provide that for all, think about it, and change it. In (most) developed countries you can get this.

Ignoring any possible connotations (robots have no gender anyway), this one is definitely the most useful option in the list, so the one I picked.

I chose to interpret this as the anime android Robot Maid... you know, the "fully functional" kind.

For great justice, vote Cowboy Neal!

You really think a robotic CowboyNeal would be there to serve YOU?

"Why is CowboyNeal-1000/robot maid in there twice?"

Oh dear god... The Cowboy Neal-1000 in a french maid's costume...

Pass the brain bleach! Now!

I don't even want to think of what it'll do with the feather duster.

What about hoverboards? ;)

The third dimension dramatically simplifies many of the things that people have trouble with in 2d:

You no longer need stoplights. Cross traffic is handled by flying at different altitudes.

You no longer have to merge. You just make a sweeping turn as you climb so that you're always going the same direction as other traffic on your flight level. Flying in a helix that way is going to be hard for people to visualize, but in practice it's easy: you're at xxx altitude, therefore fly yyy heading +/- 5 degrees. You won't even have to really manage it yourself: it's a trivial task for the autopilot.

This also eliminates head-on traffic on a two lane road.

The traffic density becomes MUCH lower when you have all that vertical space available - instead of all the cars being confined to linear roads, they're spread out on a stack of infinite-width roads layered 40,000 feet high. Thus when you start approaching someone from behind (it's always from behind since everyone at your level is going the same direction) all you have to do is change headings slightly when you get within a few miles (!).

Those things eliminate the causes of most non-DUI accidents. Of course, flying has its own unique set of difficult problems, but I don't think the "average person doing 3d maneuvers" is significant enough to kill it.

The flying car would just bring stupid into the third dimension.

Nothing says the flying car has to be as fast, heavy, and dangerous as current cars. I think the most ideal flying car would be something like ultra-light aircraft... Your parachute is permanently deployed, so stupid maneuvers or engine failure just results in you floating down to the ground.

My problem with the flying car is that they can no longer be constrained by curbs and other barriers... You'll have them buzzing residential neighborhoods night and day, and the occasional one crashing down onto your roof. Where you previously erected simple car barriers, now you need a full roll-cage around every structure.

Give it up. The vast majority say they want freedom, but what they really want is convenience. Sadly, encryption aint convenient.

You mean like fission? If all (literally all, including all transport) of the world's energy was from the fission, we would have enough uranium (assuming zero incease in efficiency) for at least 300 years from proven reserves. If you add thorium into the mix, we have enough for several thousand years. And if that's not enough, the Moon is rich in both uranium and thorium.

So, we do already have a vitually unlimited source of carbon-free energy. It's just that evironmentalist pseduo-scientific FUD prevents us from using it.

No we do not need fusion. We need renewable energy sources and a distributed energy production and consumption network. Fusion is just another big technology thing, which is hare to handle and which is horrible expensive. Distributed power production and consumption on the other hand is easy to realize and easy to handle. There is another such distributed technology which work quite well, it is call Internet. Yes there are big server plants in it, but that is not really necessary and even these are distributed over the grid.

Washing machine, dishwasher, microwave, roomba. Once we invent an ironing machine the robot maid will become complete.

With food pills or flying cars, enough people will lose jobs that most working people will be able to employ others to be their maid/butler. The future economy will require this to happen. The minimum wage is the only thing keeping it from happening. With automated shipping, food pills, personal flying possibilities, soaring unemployment will require relatively low minimum wages.

You don't need better solar panels, you need a better sun!

Your laptop will typically have a surface area of about 0.1 m2 (unless you have one of those small laptops, then it's far less). That means that even on a hot day in the desert, you have about 100 W available from the sun (1000 W/m2, so 100 W/laptop). Also, that assumes 100% conversion efficiency to electricity. Most laptops exceed 100W in power.

Your car, even if it's a big old American car, will have a surface area of 10 m2 (really large car). That means 10 kW of power assuming 100% conversion efficiency. 10 kW translates to 13 bhp. Most cars have 10x as much (130 bhp).

So, even at 100% conversion efficiency, you wouldn't be satisfied. But please blame our sun, not the engineers making solar panels.

I voted Underwater City, and I'm talking full on pressure domes and recreational submarines and kelp farms and intelligent genetically engineered wise-cracking dolphins and house cat sized pet octopuses. You know, the pretty standard late 60's lets-all-live-under-the-sea stuff.

Of the things listed in the poll, it contains some of the brightest dreams that we've done the least about.

Uh, in case you hadn't noticed, "suburban sprawl" has hardly slowed down, and, though slow, cheap and plentiful energy is on its way here.

Sheesh. What a pessimist.