I work with the design of heavy equipment and I’m interested in the history of technology. Sometimes I see antique equipment of various types and often wonder, “How was this thing EVER good enough to be sold and sustain a business?”
This morning I was reviewing a competitor that started in 1950 with a small crane on a metal wagon with a clamshell bucket. No bodywork at all. No way to move itself, it was towed to location on metal wheels, parked, and could load/unload trucks. I guess that beats a shovel…
I’ve worked with medical equipment which has always had a high bling factor going back to surgery kits of the 1800’s. Today, FDA regulations mandate that technology must be proven but into the 1960’s there were some really clunky surgical devices and medical electronics that were downright unsafe, despite having a finished appearance.
A current example is 3-D Printing. Looks pretty cool to the consumer but the products are very rough, of limited use, and specialized knowledge and expensive equipment are required for good quality output.
What current technology will we will look back and wonder at? Drones? What else?
Streaming video. The technology is pretty well established, but the industry is still a joke.
I think in ten years, maybe even five, we’ll look back and say “Hey, remember 2015 when every manufacturer made their own streaming device, and subtly or not-so-subtly made their own programming not work well with the other manufacturers’ devices? So you’d have to have a Fire Stick AND a Roku AND an Apple TV, or sacrifice some programming? How lame was that?”
Electric cars, and the infrastructure to support them, still have a lot of room to change. Today, there are gas stations everywhere, but electric car drivers need to make an effort to know where charging stations are. Someday that may be reversed; every parking space will have a charging cord but gas stations will be rare.
Could be anything. Remember Bones in Star Trek IV curing a patient with a tricorder or whatever that was? Today’s state of the art is tomorrow’s antique.
Artificial intelligence. At some point in the future, twenty, fifty, a hundred or a thousand years from now, AI will surpass human capability. At the moment AI can play chess and Jeopardy, and just about drive a car. In due course AI will get better at designing itself than we are, and it will be (in Jack Good’s words) ‘the last invention that man need ever make’.
You’re about fifty years late on that one. Except that it turns out that a combination of humans and computers working together do an even better job, and so that’s what we use.
Ion propulsion is useless for transporting humans, since it has such low thrust. Fusion propulsion is the minimum requirement for rapid human space travel; there are even better alternatives.
I see your point, but in due course humans will be out of the loop. The ‘even better job’ will go from 50/50 humans and computers to 20/80, then 5/95, and finally it will be George Jetson pressing a button, or Homer Simpson and a Drinking Bird.
Most biotech and genetic engineering. Right now we’re still mucking around with arcane and bespoke techniques to change a few things at a time. And except for adding or removing very simple genes with obvious functions, we can’t really predict the effects of our engineering. We don’t have a clue how to change the behavior of complicated regulatory circuits, or make predictable changes to an organisms’ development.
Its odd because todays technology seems advanced, but I’m sure in 200 years much of it will seem embryonic and primitive.
As far as technologies that are just in their infancy:
Robots that are personal, capable of learning and can perform a wide range of tasks (as opposed to today’s robots that are industrial, not capable of learning new tasks and that only perform one task over and over)
Nanotechnology
Using AI to assist in problem solving, learning, creativity, experimentation. Google will seem really primitive in 50 years.
Medicine (we just decoded the genome a decade ago, and it only became affordable a year or two ago). Pretty much medicine in general since so much of medicine nowadays is based on reductionist principles, in the future it’ll be more holistic and based on systems biology.
Space travel
Virtual reality (even cutting edge stuff is only barely beginning to seem realistic or immersive). Plus telepresence or augmented reality are very primitive now.