What is something considered impossible when you were a kid but is now known to be completely possible or even inevitable?
What is something considered impossible when you were a kid but is now known to be completely possible or even inevitable?
101 comments
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The fall of America.
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Well that was just hubris.
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"Work from home" for so many jobs.
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Which is only possible because of this magic technology to let you see and talk in near real time to anyone, anywhere. Used to be that if your sibling / parent / other family member wasn’t in town, you couldn’t see them in real time at any time, usually just a single / couple times a year at holidays.
Sure calling was a thing, but it’s just different when you can see someone.
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Working from my bedroom in the US while seeing and speaking to a fellow developer living in Pakistan is really quite awesome.
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In my pocket I carry a library of Alexandria, an infinite Walk-man, a camera and a camcorder with effectively infinite film, a personal navigator... You get the idea, the list goes on. 80s me would have thought this was impossible, even if I am a bit disappointed about the flying car and hoverboard situation.
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... a calculator, an electronic translator, an alarm clock, a video games console, an infinite DVD player, a spirit level, a personal weather forecaster, .......
oh and I also think it can make telephone calls
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A cure for AIDS
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I'm out of the loop, is that a thing? Best I know is that it's highly manageable with treatment, not cured.
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5th person confirmed cured of HIV. Stem cell transplant, apparently. Happened in Düsseldorf if your .de means anything.
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Electing a convicted felon President of the United States.
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That one cuts deep. It's really weird too because if you asked your parents they would say america would never elect a felon. Then they went on to elect a felon.
I sometimes think about trying to reach out to older folks to better understand their views but then I remember the absolute garbage brain rot they believe.
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Satellite navigation. In my early childhood we sometimes played a street racing video game that had an arrow pointing the direction on the screen. My mom would remark that she wished she had such an arrow when she drove a car IRL, by now she definitely got that wish.
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GPS is now like mini maps in racing games.
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You should have tried the GPS we had when I was training with the PLUGR.
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Wait, how old is consumer satnav? I am pretty sure it was available (albeit not too commonplace) when I was a kid in the late 90's or early 2000's. I really do take it for granted... As long as my government doesn't deliberately scramble it for security reasons, which happened a lot in the past year.
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Dedicated units were available from brands like TomTom in the early 2000's, and cell phones started getting it around 2007 or so (I remember very expensive blackberry plans had it around then). Android launched with it in 2008, and iPhones started allowing apps like Google Maps with turn by turn navigation by around the end of 2012 or so.
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I think my family at least got it in the early-to-mid 2000s, a few years after that.
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I don’t remember my first gps, but maybe early 2000’s. It was a Garmin, with no route planning, no maps and the position was coordinates
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US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.
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And literal nazis marching in the streets
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Not to steal the other comment but yeah a swiss army knife of a device that pays for things, browses the internet without running up the phone bill (and I can browse AND talk on the phone at the same time), has games and music, is a flashlight, etc.
But most importantly a name change. I thought it was impossible or extremely hard but it wasn't. Just write, pay $65, pay $12, send the documents to wherever, and that's it.
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Was changing your name not possible back then, or were you just not aware that it's possible?
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Yeah or that it was extremely complicated, and that no one in my life would respect my new name. Which, the latter, I was right about. I cut all ties I had (except family since I'm stuck with them currently) before changing my name, and eventually I will cut ties with family and receive mail in my name.
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Changing your name is such a pain in the ass though. Like yeah the actual government papers are easy but damn your name is in so many places
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The mortality of my parents. My mind is often stuck in the future of what ifs; but this is an inevitable event that will come sooner or later and it terrifies me. I do my best to cherish the time I'm fortunate to have with them while channeling energy into my own kids. I know it's the natural cycle of things, but still... Life is hard man.
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watching the decline is hard. I thought my dad would live forever. He's been gone just over a year. My mom probably won't be around much longer either. Let them tell you as many boring stories as they can.
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I'm sorry, friend. Hope you're doing well.
Yeah I honestly love the stories. Heard them all a thousand times, of course, but they never get old — especially knowing...
Anyways I can weather a lot of pain, but when it comes to my loved ones I'm a wreck.
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I know that feeling and you're not alone. It's terrifying and I don't know how others handle it or if everyone just keeps quiet about it or live in ignorance about that fact. Also doesn't help that I don't believe in an afterlive.
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Everyone grieves in their own way. My mom died when I was 36. My dad died this year. It was really rough for a while when my mom died, it made my alcoholism worse, which lead to me losing my job, which made my alcoholism worse. I had horrible nightmares that I woke up screaming from for about six months. Eventually, with the help of my wife, I put my life back together.
I wasn't close with my dad, he left when I was young. Pretty much feel the same since he died.
When it happens just do what feels natural. Your loved ones will understand. If you have kids try to explain it to them once you get a good grasp on it yourself. There aren't any answers at the bottom of a thousand bottles of vodka though, I can promise you that much.
I'm atheist as well. My mom was a severely mentally ill alcoholic and she's genuinely better off dead. If there was a hell, my dad would be in it, so I'm glad there isn't. I think it's more comforting, not less.
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I was laughed at on the playground when I got the idea for wireless charging back in the 90s.
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Nikola Tesla was working on proof of concept from 1900 until JP Morgan pulled project funding in 1917.
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My man Nikola would have invented FTL travel had he lived six months longer
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Burning a CD while using your computer for something else in the mean time.
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That's come full circle as many modern machines don't even have disc drives anymore
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Back in the 90s part of my job was to change the daily backup tape on a computer when I got there in the morning. It was an 8GB cassette the size of a deck of cards, and I remember marveling that I could carry 8 Gigabytes in my shirt pocket. Now you can get thumb drives for $20 that hold many times more, and thousands of times more than my first hard drive. (which cost about a grand)
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My math teacher: "You can't walk around with a calculator in your pocket!"
Well well well, look at me NOW, Mr. York!
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Phones doing a good chunk of what computers can
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I mean it's almost wrong handed to call something like an iPhone or Android device a "phone" because it's really a pocket computer that, among many other things, can place phone calls.
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Combined with the Internet a "phone" - as we still charmingly call it - does what the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy could do.
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A good chunk? My watch is far more capable than my first computer, many times the storage, and its screen has more pixels
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Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.
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Protein folding
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Telling the "computer" to do a thing and it just does. AI has it's upsides and saves me so much time and energy
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For real. Who would have guessed the most realistic prediction from Star Trek was talking directly to the computer. Whereas the least realistic one is that a post-scarcity society would benefit average people.
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Owning my own home. Most of us are just going to be renting for the rest of our lives.
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I had a job at the time that let me WFH maybe once every 2-3 weeks and I thought it was crazy generous lol.
Now I'm home virtually every day.
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Directly measuring gravity waves, the first measurement using LIGO was back in 2016 and they've observed almost a hundred so far. The observations are being used to create newer generations of gravity wave detectors.
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Nuclear War.
I though leaders were cool headed and rational, that they would never destroy the world.
Then I learned about Cuban Missile Crisis with Vasily Arkhipov, and the radar false alarm invident with Stanislav Petrov, amongst many more "close call" incidents. Our world almost died.
I mean like: If the many-worlds theory is true, there are probably some universes where WW3 happend and most of life is dead. Probably every 9 out of 10 universes, we died. We are alive because of luck. (I mean, we wont exist to be able to perceive a dead universe anyways).
But that can happen again. Its not over.
The "Doomsday Clock" is a prediction by scientists of existential risk to humanity, and these scientists are predicting an even more tense doomsday risk than ever before, even more so than the height of the Cold War.
(I actually had a dream/nightmare of see a nuke go off outside my window. Maybe its a vision of another timeline, or the future... 🤷♂️)
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Mine was that: I was on my phone, my phone goes blackscreen, then I look up, lights flicker a bit and turn off, I look at my laptop, and it also dies 2 second later after flickering, then I look outside my window, a huge mushroom cloud, then I wake up. And I woke up with like panic and heartrate so fast...
Honestly, maybe my brain is trying to tell me to write a story about nukes.
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Sometimes when I hear a plane fly over head I pause and wonder if this is the end. Or if things get too quiet I wonder if I am about to be swept away in the fallout of a huge explosion.
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Lol, I sometimes have network issues, then I wonder if russia (I live in the US, for context) has their putin raging for some reason and decided to nuke us for the lols. I mean, when a nuclear war happens, network disruptions usually happena right before. So I check the news, reddit, make sure I didn't miss any emergency alerts, then I realize its just a normal internet issue.
Sometimes I hear emergency sirens for no reason for an extended period of time, and I wonder if theres been some sort of attack, whether a terrorist bombing, or a nuke exploding in a nearby city, I google it, oh its just some police chase. Idk why I'm always overreacting.
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Being single
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A battery powered table saw.
Absolutely not a thing in the 1980's, in stock now at your local Lowe's.
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That one does blow me away - I've had a cordless drill for years, but a tablesaw??? - when I realized they even existed I couldn't believe it.
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A computer program winning a Go tournament.
In chess, human grandmasters routinely beat the best computers, but changing that was simply a matter of faster processors and larger memory, problems solvable by the application of sufficient quantities of money. In principle the game was already solved, and within a few decades, would be solved in practice as well.
Go was considered a much harder problem. Programs of similar complexity to a decent chess program couldn't even look at a finished game between go pros and reliably say who won, let alone get there itself. Well, guess what?
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WW3
I've realised, over time, that we got to be species number 1 through near statistically impossible odds that is only achievable by being the most brutally effective in the game of evolution.
And millions of years of nature doesn't just go away when you're declared the winner. It is in our nature to dominate through all means possible, else we wouldn't be here. It's not so much that we want war, we need it; our nature is founded on it. When there is nothing left on the planet to defeat, we turn on ourselves to scratch the itch.
The catch is the other half of our nature is focused on domination of the species. We protect each other for the greater good as much as we kill for the greater good. That's our human nature; that's how we got here. So after a war we feel awful and promise to never do it again, but then the itch of being number 1 reappears and there's nothing else to scratch it with because we conquered everything else.
Our known history affirms that the end-game of evolution is a never ending cycle of masturbating to awful shit, feeling ashamed, and just doing it again once the shame is overridden by the urge. "Never again" we say, every fucking time.
Edit: That's why I also love the self-proclaimed "lefties" camp always misappropriating the philosophical Paradox of Tolerance on here—like it's not misappropriately used by the other camps. Ironically all just proving the paradox true. Camp vs camp. Tribe vs tribe. The itches and scratches, Oblivious to human nature doing as it does best. To progress is to win by all means possible. This is our way.
Edit Edit: And no I'm not picking on you kids specifically. Look at Tall Poppy Syndrome, Soapboxes, why communism never works, why capitalism never works; all the other ideologies we think up to break the cycle and try fast forward our evolution in vain. They all end with with someone or something taking power for a brief moment, before they're targetted to be cut down by the nature of others trying to instill their idea, how they want it, how they insist all others will want and should have it. Power.
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True. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to break the cycle. Although we are heading towards another great conflict, we are currently in an era with less hunger, more education, and less poverty throughout the world than ever before. We clearly did something right. Let's try to do even better in the future. Lets evolve, step by step, cause that Is was are good at!
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Oh, yeah. We definitely keep trying to break the cycle, else we'll all be extinguished at some point. It won't be broken in the near future, but over many generations of each doing their part, it will eventually evolve into something better; the old perks of the species no longer relevant or needed, eventually evolved out.
Whether or not we can survive ourselves in the meantime is a whole new hurdle in our path.
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Swallowing gum.
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Going to Mars.
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Child me is just dying to have the dancing and gaming skills I have!
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Child me wishes he had the basic communication skills and treatments for his mental illness.
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Self driving cars.
We are on the early stages currently; ignore what Tesla/musk says; in 10 - 20 years full level 5 autonomy will be common place.
In the 80's the Cray 1 supercomputer was made, now I have so much more computer power in my pocket its frankly ridiculous. And it's runs on milliwatts rather than kilowatts.
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Honestly not convinced, we've been promised self driving cars for almost a decade and we unearthed way more problems than ways of getting closer. And honestly, there are soo many situations where even I'm not sure what the correct course of action would be, so I'm not holding my breath for an AI sourcing from our collective actions.
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That may not be the way.
But don't forget, all advances are cumulative.
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I'm super curious how they will handle inclement weather where lanes cease to exist. And drive thrus. How will it handle a drive thru fully autonomously?
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Yeah the issue with predictions around things like autonomous vehicles is it assumes tech advancements will flow in one direction/domain. There are still serious limitations of current AI systems in regards to autonomous vehicles and the next breakthrough may not be one relevant to that domain.
Its certainly possible, but we've basically been on the current autonomous vehicle hype for about 10 years already.
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Real answer...
GPS accurate enough to tell the car where the lanes are.
Drive thru wouldn't be too bad, it's essentially stop and go traffic. Plus, when full autonomy happens, drive thrus will become less common. You can just pre-order your food while the car is driving you to the restaurant. The restaurant will tell the car how long the food will take, and what parking spot to use. Then your car will tell the restaurant your ETA, and notify them exactly when you arrive. Food is waiting, so you just grab the bag and go.
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The same way we do.
Slow down; drive by feel; look to the sides for trees, sign posts, other markers, knowing the roads.
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I work in the automotive industry. I believe we could be there in 10 to 20 years, but I'm not convinced we will be there.
Specifically, because vehicle autonomy has been a big buzz word in the industry for a decade or so, and it's starting to lose its zing. And when buzzwords lose their zing, the money dries up and the industry moves on.
Things like speed-adjusting cruise control and lane-keeping assistance, for example, are trivial to implement from a technological standpoint and don't cost much to add. But they don't show up in too many vehicles, because consumers stopped caring. I worked on a trailer backup assistance feature in a 2015 pickup that added zero production cost, but very few vehicles implement anything like that. Not because they're not valuable features, but because the industry loses interest and moves on.
The automotive feature that boggles me most is 4-wheel steering (where the rear wheels can move about 10 degrees or so). I've driven a vehicle with this feature, and it's an absolute game-changer. And it doesn't cost that much to implement either. Too bad the big OEMs don't care, because once you've driven one, you want it on every vehicle ever. Sigh.
End rant.
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Wireless power transfer/charging. The only thing even alluding to it being possible when I was growing up, was Nikola Tesla's work; and most people thought most of his ideas were bunk.
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Im surprised to see this pop up multiple times. If my device more or less is still plugged in with wireless chargers (as it can't really be "off" the pad) it's really not that impressive to me. Not to mention we've been pumping power through the air since the first radio.
If my device could charge anywhere within a certain radius (feet/meters), that would be impressive.
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I sometimes wonder if tesla was successful in his expiements but realized how it could be quickly weaponized or has some other moral implications so that he destroyed all his research.
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He's ideas were interesting.
But practically, he didn't have a method to transport power without wires.
Yes, running wires is difficult. But trying to transmit power is staggeringly inefficient.
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Achieving a world record in this day and age, which I have at least one of.
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Teleportation
It was proven on a micro scale by Jeff Kimble's team at CalTech (?) in the late 90s I think
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Considering how many asterisks you need to add there, I wouldn't say teleportation is "inevitable".
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I'm not sure quantum entanglement is indicative of teleportation but don't know much about it. Would be cool to learn more.
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I don't know if people were really talking much about this kinda stuff back then, but a PC like device that wasn't a laptop that allowed you to play full-on PC titles at home, either hooked to a TV or on its own, or on the move. Especially a device that also allows you to do normal computer things outside of playing games.
Again, not including laptop since I personally don't know any people who actually used their laptops for playing games while in a moving vehicle. There probably are plenty of people who did it or do it, but I don't know any.
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