Five Technologies I'd love to See
Technology has given us a lot of cool things. I'm a fan of vaccines and ibuprofen. You can now talk to your friends and family basically anywhere. The Norwegians invented kveik beer yeast. Thanks to the internet, a solid chunk of human knowledge is just sitting there basically for free. They've even started making Mildly Sycophantic Mentats to predigest it for you. And we have dating apps. Everyone loves dating apps.
But, this is surely a fraction of what could be. There are many technologies I would love to see, some more fanciful than others; here are a few of them.
Self - driving lawnmowers. If consistently good drivers, self - driving car will be great -- I, too, wish I could get drunk and play Breath of the Wild during my homeward commute. But, far more pressing is the need for self - driving lawnmowers. In my country, we have a strange custom where middle - class people are forced to trim small fields of Odd Foreign Plants. And if you forget to for a few weeks, or if you replace them with pretty native plants, burly men with guns will take you away. Or so I'm told, it's never come to that in my experience. I hate this. Let's just automate the whole process, have a robot perform the blasted ritual for me.
Frozen pizzas that taste good. The frozen pizza is a great boon to the young bachelor, it occupies a happy median between actually cooking and drinking soylent. The trouble is that the sensory experience really leaves much to be desired. Just make one that tastes and feels good. This is an engineering problem. You're smart, you can do it.
Cheap lab grown meat. I want eat pork chops but don't want to kill Wilbur. Some people find lab grown meat kind of horrifying, but I don't. I get a bit of revulsion towards heavily processed meat (The meme is simply correct about this matter), but not to lab - grown meat.
Autism glasses. Nowadays, having bad vision is not very disabling -- we have glasses for that. Let's do the same thing for social disabilities. Imagine a pair of glasses that look like any other. But, depending on what social cues are flying around you, they apply a mild distortion to your visual field -- increased saturation means he's teasing you, a touch of bloom means she's flirting. Of course, you can customize it to your liking, toggle off the social cues you don't miss. After awhile, maybe you manage to learn the patterns an don't need them anymore. I, at least, would love these.
Iatrogenic Short Sleeper Syndrome. There's a rare condition called Short Sleeper Syndrome, where a person can need as little as four hours of sleep. This sounds great, let's give doctors the power to prescribe it. It basically lengthens your conscious life by a sixth. Currently, you can do this by not sleeping enough, but that lowers your quality of life (and puts you at increased risk of lots of nasty diseases). I wouldn't want to eliminate sleep entirely, I like sleeping. But, I wish I could have less of it. Maybe we shouldn't let the treatment work on everyone, though, that might create a social expectation that everyone work more. I want to get off a normal time and do whatever until 12:30, only to wake up fully refreshed at 5:00 AM.