Ask Lemmy

Cures to cancer, Complete transition to green enviormental friendly tech Products that are build to last and do well rather than quick throw away - my favorit was the glass from east germany that could not be destroyed

flying cars do exist (they're called helicopters) but they're horribly expensive and energy-inefficient. that's just due to a law of physics, not due to human society at all.

In the United States, practically every advancement in medicine will be forbidden, as long as the current regime rules us.

There wasn't one, we'll only restrict who gets to have it, how, when etc.

Flying cars are a bad idea because it'd cost hundreds of times as much for the fuel, and be ridiculously dangerous to drive. Drivers have a problem with the ~2 dimensions already. They are infeasible for at least another century.

They'd also need specialized takeoff and landing areas due to the amount of force it'd need to exert on the ground.

Trains in North America.

We had them at one point, built the nation with them, then so summarily decided that the automobile was better, that we built all of our infrastructure assuming that nobody would ever not want a car to go everywhere, making it doubly hard to convince people that public transit doesn't have to suck.

Flying cars would be the worst idea ever

Imagine drones flying all over the place,all the time. The noise, the visual pollution, the crashes where debris then falls down on other people

Now imagine these drones to be 2 tonnes

Affordable, effective, mass manufactured suicide devices.

I'm not saying that I personally want one right this minute, but society tends not to encourage making suicide easy.

The closest thing we have, in the US, is cheap handguns, and while these do get used a lot for suicide, but they're not guaranteed death, and can lead to severe injury and disability instead.

You could argue that society doesn't want its members to suicide because of economic, religious, or whatever reasons, but the outcome is the same:

Society doesn't want you to suicide, in the face of personal emotional trauma, economic, or medical difficulties.

Watch me get downvoted for suggesting this.

Widespread commercial nuclear fission power, for better or worse.

Thanks to the gross mismanagement of Chernobyl and Fukushima and over-reaction to it (EDIT: and also Greenpeace, see reply), it has been largely defended and derived. And thanks to renewable energy being more affordable than ever, it might no longer make sense to build it.

That said, flying cars and generative AI have one thing in common: they are more harmful than anticipated.

If we had flying cars, even if the crash problem was solved by making them autonomous and fully protected from cyberattacks and unable to perform terrorist attacks (good luck lmao), we would still have noise everywhere. Think low-flying planes, but constantly. (And, of course, the proponents of the technology would call everyone complaining about it Amish Luddites who want to "stop progress".)

Neither are due to "society".

Flying cars need a load of power and would be very expensive to buy and fly. And one would need a pilot license, too.

True AI does not exist. What we have are LLMs, digital parrots with a large dictionary, that only appear to be intelligent because they produce convincing sentences.

Legal easy access to high quality drugs. Too many people are unable to regulate their alcohol, let alone ket, mdma, speed, lsd, etc if it were sold under similar rules as booze.

Improved traffic infrastructure, particularly cycling. People would prefer to keep doing the wrong thing than change their habits.

Genuinely, adequate and extensive medical knowledge and technology for female bodies and people of color.

There is a colossal, glairing lack of medical knowledge and technology for female bodies and people of color. This is because of a millennium old issue of

1. Patriarchy prioritizing the funding of medical research for men
2. Racism excluding people of color from medical research, while downplaying the significance of their medical issues and their worth as people.
3. Anti-science dipshits who oppose any and all sexual education among the masses and among experts because their magical sky fairy from an ancient text that's been mistranslated century after century tells them vaginas are gross and evil.

Flying cars are not a practical technology at the moment because we don't have a way of making them fly. Unless you basically want to just redefine the helicopter as a car. Once we've solved the flying problem I think we'll probably just make themselves driving.

Pretty much all interconnected systems that could use technology. No aggregate medical systems, no collectve smart systems for home, transit, energy

We cannot have star trek because google, ms and pallantir want to se them to own us.

True all you can eat buffets.

Pre-birth DNA editing to ensure a healthy and ideal child.

Eugenics is awful. It's horrible. There is no question and there's a million historical and fictional deep dives one can do to objectively prove that it is against any form of morality you could possibly come up with.

But, improving the human experience, ensuring no one is born with a disability, ensuring that everyone has the best possible chance to enjoy and experience life would be amazing. If society could get its collective shit together we could in fact make sure that every person gets the best possible experience of our species. We could pretty much entirely eliminate childhood cancers. We could make super heroes (relative to unmodified humans). We could eliminate genetic defects that have plagued families and entire populations since pre-history.

I am one of the current generative "AI" naysayers. It's not society holding it back, it's the fact we don't know how to make true AI.

Now a classless system where everyone can be equal, that will never happen because of society.

Fair and true justice for all not just the rich will never exist because of society.

I don't see any tech not existing just because of "society". Even flying cars, it's the fact they're so inefficient and hard to make is why we don't have them, otherwise we could automate them.

Suicide booths