Just seeing one convincing video would be nice, all the current ones (the tictac, gimbal etc) are easily shown up as camera artefacts and oddities. I haven't seen a single video yet that has convinced me of a UFO. I'd hope that if aliens really have travelled 100's of lightyears to get here, they would be able to see all of our suffering and would actually help us. Hell even a clandestine hint about a cure for cancer would help

I'd like a watch that can show e-mails, take calls/texts, run basic apps like WhatsApp and a VOIP client and do voice assistant tasks, one that doesn't need to be tethered to an iphone or even need an iphone. I'm not a huge phone user, I mostly use a PC, so such a watch would be great for me. If it had a webinterface or a way to run all current android apps that need a full display that would be better too.

Looking further on into the future, I'd like a wristband phone, with a foldout flexible OLED display. Normally it would be an inch wide and would display basic info. But then you can slide out a 6" flexi display across your arm and use it for full on use. Or it has a built in projector (a good one, as current micro-projectors are useless).

But the tech for this is a while off yet considering processing, display, power and comm requirements. But I could see such wristbands replacing a large segment of phone users in 20 years if they are any good.

A company called Cicret were going to release a phone bracelet that projected onto your arm, but it was a total scam because we won't have the tech for it for years yet, Captain Disillusion did a great video on it (atm battery life would suck, the processing power means the interface will be barely functional, and the projection is so dim and distorted as to be unreadable). But in 20 years perhaps it'll be do-able.

As far as "real" phones, who knows. I guess the problem with a watch/wrist phone, is it's hard to disconnect them and use them as GPS

Stuff that requires varied physical work (not the same thing over and over like an assembly line) that also requires a bit of thought.

Such as a car mechanic. (Car mechanics may go away more due to cars becoming simpler laptop like devices you just plug in and unplug batteries/chips/sensors into, not because of AI)

but at the moment a mechanic for an ICE car. To replace this you'd need a humanoid robot that can maneuver all over a car, inside the engine bay, underneath etc. It'd need the physical power to undo bolts, but be delicate enough not to break plastics, glass etc.

It would need to parse questions and audio - a customer coming in saying "my car is knocking, can you find out why" - it would then need to be smart enough to know what is noise from the car, and what is noise from an adjacent car, or knocking from an adjecent worker hammering etc.

I can't see this happening for decades, at the moment we can barely build a humanoid robot that can pick up a package from a shelf, move it through a few rooms + doors, and put it in the back of a truck.

All of our current impressive AI relies on massive training data, such as alphastar being trained on billions of starcraft games, or GPT-4 being trained on billions of texts. How would you train a robot litterpicker or mechanic? Would you record every current car mechanic all day?

I can perhaps see jobs going through our world being made simpler. Such as 30 years ago computers were more complicated, a laptop cost $2000 and needed jumper settings, software bios config, etc. Now a chromebook costs $200 and a child can operate it.

So I can see things being simplified, instead of very complicated engines needing oxy sensors, thermostats, timing etc etc. A car would have a battery, motor, and sensor modules, on top of a basic chassis with modular suspension. And when your car fails it'll flag up on the computer, you take it to the garage and the robotic garage would just slot out a failed sensor module and slot in a new one.

But that wouldn't help in say building maintenance, running electric cables through a new build or anything like that. The jobs that'll stay will be the opposite to what people used to say - people used to say blue collar jobs will disappear and only artists and white collar "creatives" will be left, but it's now looking like the total opposite.

They genetically modified a yeast to produce morphine but the yields were too low for it to be commercially viable. I hope some noble scientist can work on the process and leak us a strain :-)

Sci-fi's always going to be dated in 20 - 30 years, unless it's the very rare type e.g. 2001. Even now I'll watch a sci-fi movie made in the past 2 years, that is meant to be set 50+ years in the future, and it'll have an internal combustion engined'd car/truck complete with diesel engine sounds, and the displays will be basically modern day LCD panels.

Sure banks of flat LCD panels look sleek now, but then so did banks of fishbowl CRT panels in the 1980's and look how dated they are now.

My prediction would be, if Fusion isn't developed in 50 years, hopefully they will invent a very good, cheap, energy dense, quick to charge energy storage mechanism. E.G. something the size of a laptop battery, that holds 5 times as much, doesn't degrade, can charge in 5 minutes, and costs $10. Then the actual energy source won't matter so much as there'll be so much storage to use.

And I guess a sci-fi story can involve fighting over a windmill or hydro plant so the heroes can charge their batteries to power an RV - like Mad Max though instead of fighting for a rig of guzzoline, they can fight to charge a trailer battery that would last a month and can then be recharged again.

A plot point might be these storage solutions are very volatile, after all they would be very energy dense, that would be a problem to fix