All of us in our department were chatting a while back, and my boss said she thought everything that could be invented had been invented, and she didn’t think there’d be any “new” gadgets coming down the pike.
I thought this was rather short-sighted (not to mention underestimating human ingenuity) but she is my boss, a good one, and I didn’t want to argue with her. I said I thought new advances would be coming along in medicine.
I know it is hard for us now to imagine something that hasn’t been dreamed of yet, but I was wondering what you thought the next big invention would be. I still think there’s a lot of room for growth in computers and medical technology, and even space exploration.
Definitely short-sighted. There’s tons of things which haven’t yet been invented. Obviously, I can’t name them, cause if I could I’d invent them and be rich.
Seriously, there’s huge areas of research yet to be fully explored and made use of. And of course, there are always improvements to existing inventions. The US Patent Office accepts thousands of new inventions every year, and the number keeps growing.
Re-usable Space ships that don’t suck. (This may sound harsh, but in ten years we’ll be looking back thinking, “Man, our space ships sucked!”)
Nanotech is well on its way, and that is going to be one of those big world changing developments.
Hologram films, followed by hologram television type displays. They have already begun.
Voice recognition keyboards…don’t have to type anymore, just talk. Already invented, waiting for easier/cheaper way to do it.
Flat screen tv’s that are so thin, you can roll them up. Already done and you will see them in the next couple of years.
Artificial limbs that use a microchip to the brain. Studies already done and looks promising.
Weight lose shot using natural hormones from the body. Study just came out that said it will be only a few years away.
By the way…coolest gadget of the year, and destined to be a big hit at Christmas…at Urban Outfitters website (no, I do not work for them, nor do I have anything to do with the product) is a $35 joystick that has all of the old video games…Asteroids, Pong, etc. on a single chip in the joystick. You just plug it into any television and off you go! Very retro, and very cheap.
Rumour has it that electronic paper is not too far away. Thin and foldy like paper. Some kind of interface (plug??) and it’s a variant on a computer screen. You can keep it in your briefcase, and then when you want to you download your favourite newspaper, magazine or book so that you can read on the train.
[slight hijack]
I had a conversation with a friend a few years ago; the gist of which was:
Hardly anything got invented in the nineties – at least in terms of normal household items. A whole lot of eighties and seventies inventions got improved and made accessible, but not much actually new.
Eg:, the PC, the microwave, the VCR, the CD, the internet, cellphones…
Can anyone supply a common use item that was actually invented in the last 13 years?
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I think the airborne car (not an airplane, not a helicopter) is almost ready. The Moller Skycar has been ‘just around the corner’ for thirty years, so hopefully…
But as regards a REAL Big Giant Leap Forward in transportation…‘beaming’ technology, a la Star Trek’s transporter. I believe it’ll really happen, it’s just a matter of time.
Futorology is fascinating. I think when it comes to predicting the future, although there are obvious epistemological limits, victory usually goes to the optimist. ‘Progress’ within a given field tends to equate with notions of better, smaller, handier, faster, more convenient, more effective, easier to use and so on. Hence any developments we can anticipate which fit these criteria stand a good chance of coming true.
There are three riders to this rather ‘happy’ outlook. 1. It’s always as well to bear in mind the fundamental ecological principle: you can’t take out without putting something back. 2. Complex systems tend to veer towards stasis. Read Edward Tenner’s wonderful book ‘Why Things Bite Back’ for a wonderfully rich and witty commentary on why improvements are often ‘one step forward, one step back’. 3. ‘Progress’ in one field can lead to regress in another, and the side effects or secondary effects often take a while to be understood. I’m sure that when the ozone-damaging propellants were first invented, they were seen as ‘progress’.
So, back to the OP…
we’ll get far better at being able to store data and shove it around in useful ways than we are now. The digital revolution still has a long way to go. So you can take almost any aspect of our current data processing technology that sucks (e.g. waiting for web pages to load, waiting for hamsters to wake up) and imagine that somone will think of a way around it. User interfaces will evolve in leaps and bounds (if that’s not a contradiction) and become far more intuitive. Remember, 70% of people still can’t program their VCR, build a web page or use a keyboard with any kind of facility.
medical science is another area where there is much to be discovered. The workings of the human body, and the nature of dysfunction and cure, are massively complex and in some ways we’ve only just scratched the surface (half-pun intended). Our understanding of genetics is currently no more than primitive, and I’m confident there are discoveries to be made that will seem ‘magical’ by our standards.
new and more efficient ways of killing and maiming large groups of people will be developed. This is a sadly constant motif of human progress.
food technology still has a long way to go. We’re still not very good at synthesising foods. We tend to go to extravagant and costly lengths to produce, say, a piece of steak, simply because we don’t know any way of making one except letting a cow grow and then killing it. The days of the ‘petri dish steak’ (or steak equivalent) cannot be far away.
archictecture. New materials and new structural methods are always being hatched, and these in turn make new designs possible. In the future we will see buildings and types of buildings that simply can’t be made at the moment because of engineering limitations. I don’t say the future will be the ‘chrome monorails and shiny sky cities’ of sci fi, but we will see lots of new options opening up
someone will invent a way to package and deliver biscuits (cookies) so that the top one isn’t broken when you open the packet
someone will invent a VCR you can set from home via the phone (some TIVO-style systems can be set remotely via the internet already)
translation is a field ripe for fresh innovation. When organisations such as the UN or the EEC get together, there’s this highly cumbersome and labour-intensive process of duplicating every printed document in n languages, and hiring interpreters to do simulatenous translation (which I’ve heard say they can only do in limited shifts of 30 or 60 minutes at a time, because it’s so brain-intensive). I don’t think Trek-style ‘universal translators’ are around the corner, but I do think all this cumbersome apparatus will be replaced with simpler systems using advanced AI heuristics that can do whatever it is that the human translator’s brain manages to do.
we’ll get better at recycling, partly because we will have to and partly just because there are technological solutions waiting to be developed. For example, we’ve mastered the art of printing in colour on to steel and other metals (everything from soda cans to cars of many colours). But when we try to recycle these materials, we have to strip the paint off or cover it up. I think in future these won’t be permanent applications of pigment, but pigments which are temporarily fixed in the substrate and can be ‘unfixed’. There are already applications like this which use intense ultra-violet light - shine UV once to ‘fix’ the paint, shine it again to ‘unfix’ it, and the paint just comes off the material when it’s washed.
The one I’m waiting for is a roll of Scotch tape on which you can always find the end, a supermarket where you can always find an empty checkout and a book which provides the correct answer to the question ‘Honey, do you think this dress suits me?’.
Wow Ivylass, your boss is indeed short-sighted and hopefully very incorrect. When my grandparents were born (first decade of the 20th century), the “horseless carriage” had only just been invented; the Wright brothers had just flown an airplane for the first time in 1903; and the “average” lifespan was probably under 50 for many. By the time my parents were born, in the late 20s, the now routine childhood vaccines had yet to be invented (one of my Dad’s brothers died as an infant of whooping cough), penicillin had yet to be discovered, and people were just starting to get radios–TV had just been invented. By the time I was born in 1952, medical science was working hard on the polio vaccine, cars had only just started having seatbelts installed, and the surgeon general had yet to declare smoking to be deadly. So when I look back 100 years and take into account what all has become every day to us today and compare it with then, it’s almost unimaginable the difference. So hopefully in 100 years …
Medical science will have found cures or at least more effective treatment for things like cancer and AIDS–hopefully even a way of preventing them.
Mental health disorders will also, hopefully, have better and more effective treatments–perhaps even cures. This is definitely an area where the surface has just been scratched–there is so little that even the best educated scientists know about the brain and how it works or how to treat it when it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.
Technology in general will continue to be refined and defined; we’ll become more and more automated. IMHO, there are a great many advances yet to be made in space travel. Not in my lifetime but perhaps in a century or two, there will be interstellar space travel, yes, a la Star Trek.
There’s so much more, it’s hard to put it all down at one time! But surely everything to be invented has -not- already been invented. JMHO, mind you.
In the future, there will be tiny wireless insect-robots capable of generating TRILLIONS of spam messages per second. And they will crawl up into your house’s electrical system and modulate the electrical signal off/on thousands of times per second - so it will sound like your washer/dryer, fridge, etc. are all talking to you in deep rumbly voices about penis enlargement and fat-burning mortgages.
Now why would I want one of those newfangled contraptions? My new 1980 model car runs on autopilot down the highway so I can just sit back and relax - and it uses clean, safe nuclear energy!
