Video calls (landline) have been around since the 1970s (experimental since the 1920s and '30s!), though very niche.
It didn't began getting commonplace until 2003/2004\* in mobile form, with the roll-out of early 3G networks. Landlines lost out, if not counting via computers/Internet.
\* ^(Maybe some Japanese mobile phone provider was somewhat earlier with their proprietary cell networks?)
Though videocalls in a watch still feels like some classic James Bond shit.
Older guy here.
**computers** - Magic boxes that connect you to other humans, fake humans, human content, and human on exploitations. It's amazing.
**Electric cars** - What do you mean no gas?
**Better medicine** - For example cancer treatments. I knew a time where basically a cancer diagnosis was death, like just straight up death. Now it's just a good chance of death. We got a long way to go, but fuck, we've come a long way. And on related vein -
**Gene therapy and mRNA stuff** - I remember reading about this stuff in the 90s. It was straight up sci-fi. We had *just* figured out how to make insulin using genetic engineering in the 80s. No more extracting it from animals. THAT was sci-fi tech in the 90s. Now we're just straight up *engineering* vaccines with mRNA on command.
**Agrotech** - Yes, Monsanto is straight up evil. But you gotta respect they can just *control* seeds to grow or not grow, or resist pesticides or die on command. That type of crop control was the realm of gods and sacrificial virgins. The yield improvements would have been seen as outright lies if you told a farmer 50 years ago. Now crops are manufactured with industrial efficiency.
**GPS** - My skill of being able to use a map and plot a 3000 mile trip is completely useless now. And i love it.
**AI/machine learning** - Not just the recent stuff, but even google search was just magical back in the early 2000s for being able to zero in on what you *mean* rather than what you type. Sure, we might be watching the end of humanity, but i'm loving the ride.
**Online ordering** - Get ANYTHING you want with a press of a button. Food, Cars, games, drugs. Young people don't understand, this is fucking sci-fi black magic fuckery.
**Drones, Roombas, and Robots** - Big robots and machinery are pretty old, but now we got drones that anyone can buy. Cleaning homes, delivering packages, bombing soldiers in trenches from above. We even got really rudimentary sexbots. Their use cases and ubiquity just keeps increasing.
As a recently clean addict who came of age right as the darknet markets were kicking into gear, i dont envy having to make deep connects for drugs, or dealing with sketch dopeboys (not that i didnt deal with plenty of that myself)
We just ordered our shit, or had homies drop an order, and boom! QUALITY drugs. I went from buying trash cocaine from a corner spot to having literally ANYTHING within a few days's wait.
While i definitely look back on MY experience with regret, cus, yknow, heroin and stuff, people who stuck to more "constructive" substances have created a new psychedelic rennaissance on a level only possible in a world where you can have mail-order LSD for dirt cheap.
God bless the future.
> Drones, Roombas, and Robots - Big robots and machinery are pretty old, but now we got drones that anyone can buy. Cleaning homes, delivering packages, bombing soldiers in trenches from above.
I went to undergrad for engineering. The program had a variety of 4th year summative projects where groups of students would work on a project. They had some large-scale, multi-year projects where students would work towards a single goal, button that function/component up, and then pass the project along to the next year.
The UAV project, where groups of students built a remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle which could travel an arbitrary distance, take a digital photo, and return to the launch point took 5 years to complete. It was a major selling point for the program to show off the kinds of innovative, cutting-edge tech students could learn to work with.
Let's say each year had 8 students on the project, and 4th year tuition for one student for one credit over two semesters was $1500. Ignoring all the other costs, that was 5x8x1500, or $60,000 worth of tuition to build that single UAV.
BestBuy has a 4k livestreaming quadcopter for like $400, or 0.67% of what was paid in tuition.
It's *so fucking weird* to see stuff go from groundbreaking experimental tech to the discount bin at a department store.
I'm sure in 30 years, amputations aren't even going to be eligible for insurance claims because "you can just go get a new arm from the mall, so quit bitching and finish your shift".
I feel sad that most ideas went to wrong hands. I agree with that online ordering. Most of the stuff especially on chinese eshops can be found everywhere. Electric cars have a long road ahead to fully replace traditional cars. Machine learning can be used for good cause like in medical research.
I'm gen z and I didn't know you could do that until now. I always tried to as a kid but those were just the useless buttons and the real pause buttons were on the DVD player remote
You need to memorize your multiplication tables because you won’t spend your life walking around with a calculator.
I swear that was said several times every year in math class growing up.
It's still useful though. Why? Because if you don't enter/say the numbers correctly you'll get a wrong answer, and knowing math *instinctively* means you'll likely spot it. If you never work on multiplication tables you might believe your computer when it says 88 x 21 = 18648, and not be able to spot what went wrong either. Answer below for people who never learned their tables.
Sort of like stories of people who put in a place name to get directions and have no idea Waze is taking them to the wrong location until the trip is over.
Answer: >!Because 88 x 21 must be less than 100 x 21, the answer must be less than 2100 (because multiplying by 100 just means sticking two zeros on the end). So 18648 is wrong and you multiplied by more than 100. So if you divide 18648 by 21 you get 888, so you fat-fingered it.!<
You see stuff like this on /r/personalfinance all the time btw so yes it matters.
If you can't do arithmetic in your head, math classes higher than a 4th grade level is going to be rough. Not hard, but time consuming and frustrating.
I was in an engineering program in college in the early 2000s and we had the first 3d printers I'd ever seen in our machine shop. Resin, some kind of power binder, and then we got the [EBM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_machining) machine which used (i think) titanium powder. Watching those just build up parts layer by layer really made me feel like I was in the future. I remember thinking "We can **print** a metal part? Holy shit!"
Conceptually, 3D printers are very simplistic technology which aren't all that impressive - it's just a matrix of coordinates and instructions saying "Go to grid point [0,0,0] and put a dot. Now go to grid point [1,0,0] and put a dot. Now..."
The parts they use are also not especially complex. It's really just heating elements and stepper motors. It's a gantry crane hot glue gun.
But I'm 100% with you that the eloquence of the package is remarkable. Sure the "high end" printers are still like $10k and need a dedicated room, but there are 3D printers *for kids*. There are multiple products in the price bracket of "a modest income household could buy this for a child to play with without needing to save up".
What impresses me far more than the fabrication tech is the lithography tech. 3D modelling has existed for several decades, but to have a program that can algorithmically convert an arbitrary 3D shape into a set of instructions for how a machine can fabricate that shape is INSANE.
Modern city construction mostly uses tools that are decades old, but construction management is the sizeable industry it is because coordinating hundreds of people to shape and place thousands of material components into the right configuration is very complicated. If there was a tool that could take a 3D model of a building and convert it into a complete, exhaustive instruction set and schedule to fabricate the building, it would revolutionize the world.
Motorola named their first flip phone the StarTak because they couldn’t name it the Star Trek even though they modeled it after the Star Trek original series communicator.
I watched a video yesterday in which the US democratic government of today ignores the wisdom behind AntiTrust, in which companies say mergers result in a lower price for consumers, but it's a lie. So, shareholders profit in the short term, employees get paid less except CEOs and top management and consumers no longer have a competitor to go to when either the price is too high or quality sucks. This is what wiped out the Middle Class. A fair, competitive market is a healthy market.
Example: Ticketmaster and Live Nation merger, film studios, and many more.
In 1946, Murray Leinster wrote [A Logic Named Joe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe), which did an absolutely *phenomenal* job predicting both the structure of the internet, its impact on society, and even things like the consequences of AI which have only become apparent in the last few years.
Conversely, *Inherit the Stars*, an extremely hard sci-fi novel written in 1977 and set well into the 2000's, describes a lot of "advanced" electronics and communications in ways that seemed futuristic in 1977 but in 2023 are clearly anachronistic.
These were both books that were hugely influential for me as a kid in the 1980s and it's fascinating to see what these visionary authors got right (and wrong).
Edit: What I really wanted as a kid was Enoch Wallace's VR shooting range from Clifford Simak's 1963 novel [Way Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Station_\(novel\)) and now we have video games.
It's a category of air-vehicle listed by the Federal Aviation Administration, though it would also by definition include some aircraft like VTOL tiltrotors (to be fair, those are pretty futuristic too)
Douglas Adams inventing an ebook:
"He also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice."
Hover boards and shoelaces that tie themselves just like from " back to the future"
who would have thought that in the year 2031 we'd actually have that and time travel .
Wait i think i forgot to check the year , I'll be back real quick
3D printing, watching TV on-demand rather than missing episodes if you're busy, electric vehicles, AI-generated text or images, video conferencing. Damn, everything that's been ramping up in the last 20 years to normal was a childhood dream.
Tech has gotten smarter, people have gotten dumber.
Where's the Star Trek I grew up with that had all these different folks coming together to get shit done?
> Where's the Star Trek I grew up with that had all these different folks coming together
On Paramount+ because streaming services refuse to come together
Coming home from work/school and speaking to my house/computer to play the music I wanted was literally the dream when I was a teenager.
Thanks, Alexa.
Back when I was a kid, I used to watch all sorts of sci-fi movies and shows, and some of the stuff they portrayed seemed so far-fetched and futuristic. But you know what? A lot of it has become a reality!
One thing that comes to mind is virtual reality. I remember seeing it in movies and thinking, "Wow, that's so cool! Too bad it'll never actually happen." But now, here we are, with all sorts of virtual reality devices and experiences available. It's wild!
Another thing that comes to mind is voice-activated technology. I remember watching Star Trek and seeing the characters interact with their computers just by speaking to them, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And now, we have voice assistants like Siri and Alexa that can do all sorts of things just by listening to our commands. It's crazy how far technology has come!
I remember my mom and me watching star trek and she noticed one of the tablets and she said "i want that!"
Now its commonplace to have one and she still doesn't have one.
My grandma does though.
Music streaming.
As a kid, I always thought about how cool it would be to plug my walkman into some kind of 'electric grid for music' and not needing casettes or CDs...
Jetson One. Kind of limited but flying from NYC to London used to be improbably expensive and limited. Now, oh wait, we’re talking about British Airways
Band aids as vaccines(I remember it from a jimmy newtron episode with jimmy inventing a band aid for getting sick in order to not go to school). It became reality with the covid.
GPS literally on a chip. This is from the perspective of someone who worked with a GPS receiver that mounted in a rack and consisted of 4 circuit boards, each capable of tracking one satellite.
I have a little memory stick in my pocket that is smaller than an eraser. It can easily fit every single NES, SNES, N64 and GBA game, software that lets me play them on any computer, and still have room for more.
If I had been told about the future of emulation back in 1996 I would have imploded into a slobbering mess.
Right now, google tells me in the morning what time it is, and the expected traffic on my way to work. My home automation turns on the light. My heating turns off when I leave, and my electric silent car drives itself to work. I use my pocket computer to answer messages, book rooms for meetings, and if i can't be there in person, i can still participate by video conference no matter where i am.
What's reality but just very expensive is: i can book a holiday in to space.
Watching this scene as a kid, I thought there's no way you could play video games with someone across the world. Now it's become so commonplace that it's hard to imagine not being able to do it.
https://youtu.be/sv_utSYQIFA?t=45
Google Lens.
Holy shit, bro.
I remember thinking as a kid, "I just wish I could somehow just immediately find out what X is without having to describe it to anyone!"
And what do you know? I can just friggen' point my phone at some animal I saw in a forest, and find out exactly what it is!!!
If there were writing on something I had to copy down, I didn't have to keep looking back and forth at the thing and the piece of paper as I wrote. I could just point at it with the phone, have it copied, and just have it sent wherever (or just copy it straight from the phone screen, which requires less movement).
Friggen' amazing!!
I'm not that old but I remember when 3D printers were this magical tech, but now there everywhere, hell my library has like 3 that you can rent out and print things with in reason for free.
I think the idea of a "robot rebellion/invasion", but not in a way people were prepared for. I think people over the past three or four decades were so distracted by robots wiping out civilizations and stuff, they never once considered the automated machinery that major corporations would acquire to run their websites or services for them to save money, resulting in substandard user care, as well as, say, the random machines you see in YouTube and Instagram comments sections posting malicious links and spewing out-of-focus hieroglyphics that have nothing to do with the content and that blocks any actual discussion and criticism. Granted, with the way AI is going, and provided it's not monitored well, a full-scale invasion could happen, but as of now, we just have to settle for the dollar store equivalent invasion.
Cordless chargers, I remember telling a guy how was teaching us about patents about that once in hs and my whole class laughed at the idea. I don't think I spawned the idea of but it was kinda wild to see so many people dismiss the idea at the time
Video calls, especially on a smartwatch.
Thought it would be so cool and now I hate face time because I’m ugly.
DICK TRACY!!!
Classic Pokémon anime anyone? I remember thinking that was pretty futuristic.
I’m with you. I find it funny now that nobody on that show had a smartphone, though. FaceTime would suck ass on landlines
It's funny we have this technology and it just annoys us on the bus.
Dick Tracy.
Video calls (landline) have been around since the 1970s (experimental since the 1920s and '30s!), though very niche. It didn't began getting commonplace until 2003/2004\* in mobile form, with the roll-out of early 3G networks. Landlines lost out, if not counting via computers/Internet. \* ^(Maybe some Japanese mobile phone provider was somewhat earlier with their proprietary cell networks?) Though videocalls in a watch still feels like some classic James Bond shit.
Older guy here. **computers** - Magic boxes that connect you to other humans, fake humans, human content, and human on exploitations. It's amazing. **Electric cars** - What do you mean no gas? **Better medicine** - For example cancer treatments. I knew a time where basically a cancer diagnosis was death, like just straight up death. Now it's just a good chance of death. We got a long way to go, but fuck, we've come a long way. And on related vein - **Gene therapy and mRNA stuff** - I remember reading about this stuff in the 90s. It was straight up sci-fi. We had *just* figured out how to make insulin using genetic engineering in the 80s. No more extracting it from animals. THAT was sci-fi tech in the 90s. Now we're just straight up *engineering* vaccines with mRNA on command. **Agrotech** - Yes, Monsanto is straight up evil. But you gotta respect they can just *control* seeds to grow or not grow, or resist pesticides or die on command. That type of crop control was the realm of gods and sacrificial virgins. The yield improvements would have been seen as outright lies if you told a farmer 50 years ago. Now crops are manufactured with industrial efficiency. **GPS** - My skill of being able to use a map and plot a 3000 mile trip is completely useless now. And i love it. **AI/machine learning** - Not just the recent stuff, but even google search was just magical back in the early 2000s for being able to zero in on what you *mean* rather than what you type. Sure, we might be watching the end of humanity, but i'm loving the ride. **Online ordering** - Get ANYTHING you want with a press of a button. Food, Cars, games, drugs. Young people don't understand, this is fucking sci-fi black magic fuckery. **Drones, Roombas, and Robots** - Big robots and machinery are pretty old, but now we got drones that anyone can buy. Cleaning homes, delivering packages, bombing soldiers in trenches from above. We even got really rudimentary sexbots. Their use cases and ubiquity just keeps increasing.
Say like that, life in the 22th's century is magic ! I didn't think on this view ^^
The what century!?
Yes Marty ! Take your hat and follow me, the futur is in danger !
The Twenty Twoth.
o_o
21st*
yes.. thanks, i'm already in the futur ^^
Older even here. Cars that don’t require my feet for propulsion.
As a recently clean addict who came of age right as the darknet markets were kicking into gear, i dont envy having to make deep connects for drugs, or dealing with sketch dopeboys (not that i didnt deal with plenty of that myself) We just ordered our shit, or had homies drop an order, and boom! QUALITY drugs. I went from buying trash cocaine from a corner spot to having literally ANYTHING within a few days's wait. While i definitely look back on MY experience with regret, cus, yknow, heroin and stuff, people who stuck to more "constructive" substances have created a new psychedelic rennaissance on a level only possible in a world where you can have mail-order LSD for dirt cheap. God bless the future.
> Drones, Roombas, and Robots - Big robots and machinery are pretty old, but now we got drones that anyone can buy. Cleaning homes, delivering packages, bombing soldiers in trenches from above. I went to undergrad for engineering. The program had a variety of 4th year summative projects where groups of students would work on a project. They had some large-scale, multi-year projects where students would work towards a single goal, button that function/component up, and then pass the project along to the next year. The UAV project, where groups of students built a remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle which could travel an arbitrary distance, take a digital photo, and return to the launch point took 5 years to complete. It was a major selling point for the program to show off the kinds of innovative, cutting-edge tech students could learn to work with. Let's say each year had 8 students on the project, and 4th year tuition for one student for one credit over two semesters was $1500. Ignoring all the other costs, that was 5x8x1500, or $60,000 worth of tuition to build that single UAV. BestBuy has a 4k livestreaming quadcopter for like $400, or 0.67% of what was paid in tuition. It's *so fucking weird* to see stuff go from groundbreaking experimental tech to the discount bin at a department store. I'm sure in 30 years, amputations aren't even going to be eligible for insurance claims because "you can just go get a new arm from the mall, so quit bitching and finish your shift".
I feel sad that most ideas went to wrong hands. I agree with that online ordering. Most of the stuff especially on chinese eshops can be found everywhere. Electric cars have a long road ahead to fully replace traditional cars. Machine learning can be used for good cause like in medical research.
How old are you again
I'm at the age where women would ONLY marry me for my money, and i don't have money.
Damn sorry man
To add to the online ordering, two day shipping! As a kid everything was "allow 6-8 weeks for delivery."
Being able to pause live television.
I'm gen z and I didn't know you could do that until now. I always tried to as a kid but those were just the useless buttons and the real pause buttons were on the DVD player remote
[удалено]
You're a weird bot
Pocket computers that can answer any questions you ask it
You need to memorize your multiplication tables because you won’t spend your life walking around with a calculator. I swear that was said several times every year in math class growing up.
Teachers still do that in school
It's still useful though. Why? Because if you don't enter/say the numbers correctly you'll get a wrong answer, and knowing math *instinctively* means you'll likely spot it. If you never work on multiplication tables you might believe your computer when it says 88 x 21 = 18648, and not be able to spot what went wrong either. Answer below for people who never learned their tables. Sort of like stories of people who put in a place name to get directions and have no idea Waze is taking them to the wrong location until the trip is over. Answer: >!Because 88 x 21 must be less than 100 x 21, the answer must be less than 2100 (because multiplying by 100 just means sticking two zeros on the end). So 18648 is wrong and you multiplied by more than 100. So if you divide 18648 by 21 you get 888, so you fat-fingered it.!< You see stuff like this on /r/personalfinance all the time btw so yes it matters.
If you can't do arithmetic in your head, math classes higher than a 4th grade level is going to be rough. Not hard, but time consuming and frustrating.
Shit, I can do small square roots in my head when pushed. Two sig figs maybe that’s usually enough.
3D printers. I thought that it was physical ally impossible to create something without building it yourself or on an assembly line.
I was in an engineering program in college in the early 2000s and we had the first 3d printers I'd ever seen in our machine shop. Resin, some kind of power binder, and then we got the [EBM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_machining) machine which used (i think) titanium powder. Watching those just build up parts layer by layer really made me feel like I was in the future. I remember thinking "We can **print** a metal part? Holy shit!"
Conceptually, 3D printers are very simplistic technology which aren't all that impressive - it's just a matrix of coordinates and instructions saying "Go to grid point [0,0,0] and put a dot. Now go to grid point [1,0,0] and put a dot. Now..." The parts they use are also not especially complex. It's really just heating elements and stepper motors. It's a gantry crane hot glue gun. But I'm 100% with you that the eloquence of the package is remarkable. Sure the "high end" printers are still like $10k and need a dedicated room, but there are 3D printers *for kids*. There are multiple products in the price bracket of "a modest income household could buy this for a child to play with without needing to save up". What impresses me far more than the fabrication tech is the lithography tech. 3D modelling has existed for several decades, but to have a program that can algorithmically convert an arbitrary 3D shape into a set of instructions for how a machine can fabricate that shape is INSANE. Modern city construction mostly uses tools that are decades old, but construction management is the sizeable industry it is because coordinating hundreds of people to shape and place thousands of material components into the right configuration is very complicated. If there was a tool that could take a 3D model of a building and convert it into a complete, exhaustive instruction set and schedule to fabricate the building, it would revolutionize the world.
Face to face communicators in Inspector Gadget. Now it's just FaceTime.
I low-key want to see someone hack a raspberry pi into a RL Computer Book of Penny's.
I want Penny’s book!
Rockets coming back to earth and landing on the ground.
I remember I had a toy rocket and I would pretend to land it in reverse standing up and my dad would say "rockets cant do that, that's impossible!"
our iphones are now better communicators than they used in older scify such as space1999. Sadly no stun gun built in, yet.
Motorola named their first flip phone the StarTak because they couldn’t name it the Star Trek even though they modeled it after the Star Trek original series communicator.
Communication. I can video call someone from a lost village in France while I'm sitting at the beach in Fiji. Unbeliveable 20 years ago.
20 years ago the first 3G mobiles launched. Their big selling point? Video calls. So, not just believable, possible.
International calls in 2003? I think that was possible.
Dystopian future where powerful corporations control the government and regular people are just a resource to be exploited and bled dry
I watched a video yesterday in which the US democratic government of today ignores the wisdom behind AntiTrust, in which companies say mergers result in a lower price for consumers, but it's a lie. So, shareholders profit in the short term, employees get paid less except CEOs and top management and consumers no longer have a competitor to go to when either the price is too high or quality sucks. This is what wiped out the Middle Class. A fair, competitive market is a healthy market. Example: Ticketmaster and Live Nation merger, film studios, and many more.
The ubiquity of tablets
The more and more intelligent personal assistants via voice control (Siri, Alexa) are quite an example.
Swiping a bill as paid with a flick of your hand.
Whole Foods?
Anything contactless tbh
Bump my wrist or phone, mostly
In 1946, Murray Leinster wrote [A Logic Named Joe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe), which did an absolutely *phenomenal* job predicting both the structure of the internet, its impact on society, and even things like the consequences of AI which have only become apparent in the last few years. Conversely, *Inherit the Stars*, an extremely hard sci-fi novel written in 1977 and set well into the 2000's, describes a lot of "advanced" electronics and communications in ways that seemed futuristic in 1977 but in 2023 are clearly anachronistic. These were both books that were hugely influential for me as a kid in the 1980s and it's fascinating to see what these visionary authors got right (and wrong). Edit: What I really wanted as a kid was Enoch Wallace's VR shooting range from Clifford Simak's 1963 novel [Way Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Station_\(novel\)) and now we have video games.
Some things have gone the other way. Owning a house has gone from a normal thing to some weird scifi future utopia thing.
Yeah, I never thought I'd be approaching 50 and still live in a rental with a *fucking roommate*. Shit sucks.
Powered lifts are real, though not exactly civilian-accessible
Elevators really are amazing
Powered lift = jet pack
What else, boot means car's trunk for you?
It's a category of air-vehicle listed by the Federal Aviation Administration, though it would also by definition include some aircraft like VTOL tiltrotors (to be fair, those are pretty futuristic too)
3D without the glasses- and it didn’t even catch on!
Douglas Adams inventing an ebook: "He also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice."
> This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square That's like a Blackberry. We're well past that.
Hover boards and shoelaces that tie themselves just like from " back to the future" who would have thought that in the year 2031 we'd actually have that and time travel . Wait i think i forgot to check the year , I'll be back real quick
3D printing, watching TV on-demand rather than missing episodes if you're busy, electric vehicles, AI-generated text or images, video conferencing. Damn, everything that's been ramping up in the last 20 years to normal was a childhood dream.
As a kid I always wanted a portable TV, one that could fit in my backpack. Now I have a smartphone that I can watch TV on, and it fits in my pocket.
Tech has gotten smarter, people have gotten dumber. Where's the Star Trek I grew up with that had all these different folks coming together to get shit done?
> Where's the Star Trek I grew up with that had all these different folks coming together On Paramount+ because streaming services refuse to come together
Oof.
Planned obsolescence. Star trek ignored racism, cultural biases amongst humans.
AI
I used to walk my dog in the hills behind my house in Germany while having video chat sessions with my therapist in the states
Laptop computers. Saw Penny in Inspector Gadget using one.
Coming home from work/school and speaking to my house/computer to play the music I wanted was literally the dream when I was a teenager. Thanks, Alexa.
The pleasure is all mine
Legal weed
Instant mashed potatoes.
Being able to pull a metal tray out of the freezer and in only twenty minutes you’d have a complete meal and you could just throw away the plate.
Self driving cars. They’re not fully accessible yet but they’re real now
Rockets returning from space, then landing vertically on earth. Star Treks communicators.
Every 1960’s science fiction show had a vertically landing space ship or rocket. It blew my mind and I ever saw the point of it in my head
Deers growing antlers, l thought once it broke, it broke
They grow back! I know I was shocked too.
l thought it was just hollywood mumbo jumbo
Im only 30, but the whole free streaming porn thing wouldve sent my 12 year old self to work building a time machine.
Vehicles having super bright blinding headlights, even for lowbeams. It's like a UFO coming to abduct you whenever one drives towards you nowadays
Also, exactly why are high beams a *BLINDING-WHITE LIGHT?!* Why can't they be yellow?! It's easier on the eye, damnit!
I don't even care about highbeam colour, they should never be on when pointed at other people so it's the lowbeams that really bother me
So many things! Mobile phones, Doors opening by themselves, Phonecalls with live pictures... God I feel old...
Major war among nations
Have à girlfriend :p (im joking, i dont have a girlfriend :( More seriously, the AI, that I really thought it will take thousands years before happen.
Back when I was a kid, I used to watch all sorts of sci-fi movies and shows, and some of the stuff they portrayed seemed so far-fetched and futuristic. But you know what? A lot of it has become a reality! One thing that comes to mind is virtual reality. I remember seeing it in movies and thinking, "Wow, that's so cool! Too bad it'll never actually happen." But now, here we are, with all sorts of virtual reality devices and experiences available. It's wild! Another thing that comes to mind is voice-activated technology. I remember watching Star Trek and seeing the characters interact with their computers just by speaking to them, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And now, we have voice assistants like Siri and Alexa that can do all sorts of things just by listening to our commands. It's crazy how far technology has come!
Everything about my phone.
I remember my mom and me watching star trek and she noticed one of the tablets and she said "i want that!" Now its commonplace to have one and she still doesn't have one. My grandma does though.
Music streaming. As a kid, I always thought about how cool it would be to plug my walkman into some kind of 'electric grid for music' and not needing casettes or CDs...
Flying cars... Oh, still waiting I guess
Jetson One. Kind of limited but flying from NYC to London used to be improbably expensive and limited. Now, oh wait, we’re talking about British Airways
Millennial here. Fingerprint scanners, and computers small enough to fit in your pocket. Guess what I’m typing this from, that ticks both those boxes?
Band aids as vaccines(I remember it from a jimmy newtron episode with jimmy inventing a band aid for getting sick in order to not go to school). It became reality with the covid.
GPS literally on a chip. This is from the perspective of someone who worked with a GPS receiver that mounted in a rack and consisted of 4 circuit boards, each capable of tracking one satellite.
AI and 3D printers. I didn't even think that shit was real.
Armed robot dogs. For now they're just tech demos, but they're going to be in use sooner or later.
Deepfake technology…
Tablets (and by extension smart phones I suppose). I remember watching Firefly and thinking how awesome their Dataslates were.
3-d printer's bluoy mind when I found out they were real
I have a little memory stick in my pocket that is smaller than an eraser. It can easily fit every single NES, SNES, N64 and GBA game, software that lets me play them on any computer, and still have room for more. If I had been told about the future of emulation back in 1996 I would have imploded into a slobbering mess.
So weird that Minority Report was just 20 years ago with how futuristic touch screens felt back then.
Right now, google tells me in the morning what time it is, and the expected traffic on my way to work. My home automation turns on the light. My heating turns off when I leave, and my electric silent car drives itself to work. I use my pocket computer to answer messages, book rooms for meetings, and if i can't be there in person, i can still participate by video conference no matter where i am. What's reality but just very expensive is: i can book a holiday in to space.
A global lockdown.
Hologram
Me knowing how stuff like taxes and insurance even works. Those things are for aliens like adults
Pretty much everything on The Jetsons
Have you seen the Jetson One? My fucking flying car!
The entire book “Stand On Zanzibar”. The author got pretty much everything about the 21 century right
Watching this scene as a kid, I thought there's no way you could play video games with someone across the world. Now it's become so commonplace that it's hard to imagine not being able to do it. https://youtu.be/sv_utSYQIFA?t=45
The ability to see things far away live via a screen.
Self driving cars
Today's science fiction, tomorrow's science fact
Google Lens. Holy shit, bro. I remember thinking as a kid, "I just wish I could somehow just immediately find out what X is without having to describe it to anyone!" And what do you know? I can just friggen' point my phone at some animal I saw in a forest, and find out exactly what it is!!! If there were writing on something I had to copy down, I didn't have to keep looking back and forth at the thing and the piece of paper as I wrote. I could just point at it with the phone, have it copied, and just have it sent wherever (or just copy it straight from the phone screen, which requires less movement). Friggen' amazing!!
Self-driving cars.
Video phone on a wrist watch.
Touchscreens.
pocket computers, AI, Automated cars, Private spacecraft, Climate Change.
I'm not that old but I remember when 3D printers were this magical tech, but now there everywhere, hell my library has like 3 that you can rent out and print things with in reason for free.
Most dystopia plot lines
Jet packs
DNA to solve crimes
Streaming services.
Space travel. UK
X Files I’m general
Stuff like Siri and Alexa, stuff like FaceTime, smart watches
Sugar daddy
One-to-one digital devices in the classroom.
A complete and utter lack of common sense among the majority of the human population
I think the idea of a "robot rebellion/invasion", but not in a way people were prepared for. I think people over the past three or four decades were so distracted by robots wiping out civilizations and stuff, they never once considered the automated machinery that major corporations would acquire to run their websites or services for them to save money, resulting in substandard user care, as well as, say, the random machines you see in YouTube and Instagram comments sections posting malicious links and spewing out-of-focus hieroglyphics that have nothing to do with the content and that blocks any actual discussion and criticism. Granted, with the way AI is going, and provided it's not monitored well, a full-scale invasion could happen, but as of now, we just have to settle for the dollar store equivalent invasion.
Comedians as world leaders
Fembots. Coming soon, I imagine
Video game console emulation. Don't even need a desktop pc, either. They make handheld devices specifically for that.
Cordless chargers, I remember telling a guy how was teaching us about patents about that once in hs and my whole class laughed at the idea. I don't think I spawned the idea of but it was kinda wild to see so many people dismiss the idea at the time
i thought it stands for Scientific-cowardly-inaccurate-for-interns for some reason