That's clearly grimace wearing Ronald's face as a mask.

I was hoping it was outside a bail bondsman office.

Not in our lifetime.

The problem with these kinds of interfaces is that they would have to be totally personalized. Your brain has some preprogrammed behaviors, but mostly it starts with crude structures and then learns to do stuff like store and recall memories from practice. This means that while everybody's memories are stored the same way, it's not like you could ever transfer one memory from one person to another.

You would have to break the memory down into component parts and have the receiver's brain rebuild them for itself, and even then it might have some of the same elements but it would not be the same memory. All of our memories also consist of details that we fill in based on assumptions and experiences, which the receiving brain would do differently.

Recalling your own memories is probably easier than transferring memories, but faces many of the same challenges.

In any event, I do not believe that we will ever be able to do this with a memory that was not recorded specifically for this purpose. The noise in the brain is just too great to isolate a specific memory if we weren't watching it happen the first time it was recorded.

Before we get to reliving memories, we will have devices to stimulate new experiences based on random combinations of memories, which will be used for therapy like overcoming PTSD.

I think it's on the table. It definitely seems unworkable now, but when there are 10 billion people still dealing with the fallout of climate change 100 years after the generations that primarily benefited from that exploitation are dead, I think things might change.

These are the ones I have been thinking about most, recently:

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Complexity

1177 B.C.

Sunset Kingdom

Pagans

Guns, germs, and steel deals with the way that humanity's history has been shaped by the flow of resources and information, which I feel is often neglected by people thinking about the future.

Complexity deals with the way that atomized individuals making personal choices end up creating emergent behaviors. With 8 billion people on the planet, understanding those emergent behaviors is going to be crucial to understanding the future. (There are almost certainly more thorough and up-to-date books on this by now. This is just the one I read in high school so it has the most influence on me personally.)

Sunset Kingdom traces modern conspiracism surrounding sinister "Jewish Bankers" and the global apocalypse to pre-Christian, even pre-Roman notions about civilization as the one force that stands between chaos and order in the world.

1177 B.C. deals with the collapse of the Bronze age empires, a situation that I believe is very similar to the modern world in many ways. What's important here is that many of the narratives that we use to talk about the world – empires vs. barbarians – are rooted in this time period and have been passed down with relatively little change.

Lastly The Pagans portrays one of the rarest events in human history: what appears to be a true and dramatic transformation in human thinking, over the course of only a few hundred years.

In my opinion each of these books illuminates forces that shape the future, which futurists often neglect. People who hang out on this forum tend to be excited by new technologies. I know I am. But that means that there is also a technocratic strain that believes that some kind of inflection point, singularity, or other spontaneous transformation is near at hand that will make all of our dreams of the future come true, because the rest of humanity will either recognize the promise of technocracy or get dragged along kicking and screaming.

I sort of agree that there is an inflection point coming, which is why recently I have been studying the only two true such inflection points in history, that I can see.

The first is when humans stopped traveling, became sedentary, and most importantly those sedentary humans began seeing themselves as the "normal" ones, bifurcating human survival strategies in a way that pitched expansionist agricultural societies into inevitable conflict with anybody occupying any land that they wished to convert into their resources.

The second is when massive numbers of people in the centuries around 1 AD, and continuing to this day, began abandoning the notion that time, life, and history are inescapably cyclical, and began embracing the notion that proper belief and behavior could free a person (or an empire) from the cycle.

In both cases, the ideas pre-existed the transformation for centuries, possibly forever. Why did human outlooks shift so dramatically in what appears to be very short periods of time? What idea, currently held by some loony cult, is going to be treated as so obvious in 200 years, as the idea that humans want to live year-round in the same place (except for rich people of course), want to spend their days working instead of foraging, or that we can escape the fate that our eyes tell us is inevitable?

If something like that is in our future, we need to understand how it happened the last time. How did millions of people shift their outlook? How long did it take? What were the transitions like? If population density causes aristocratic imperialism to emerge from human tribal behavior, is it possible that there is some other population threshold where new, more complex behaviors might begin to emerge? And if we don't make it to that threshold, what are the chances that our current state of imperial expansion can continue, for even another half century?

I think you're lumping disparate things in a way that is not helpful.

AI's problem when it comes to writing is that reading, unlike looking at art, takes time. You can generate ten images and glance at them and quickly narrow down which ones are useful and which ones are dreck. If you're using AI to generate anything even as long as paragraphs, that's a whole lot of reading, just to pick one that you are probably going to have to modify significantly anyway.

We're also much less forgiving when it comes to inaccuracy in writing than an in art. In art, you can count on pareidolia to do a lot of the effort of making sense of the image. Not so in writing, where you have to upload the information into people's heads for them to process and reconstruct, and if any details are off they will notice right away.

The way we perceive theft/plagiarism in art vs writing is also considerably different. Artists may feel like AI is producing cheap imitations of their style, but writing AI does not even seem to be up to that level of sophistication. Telling ChatGPT to write a story in the style of an author causes it to lift whole paragraphs from that author's work, as well as plot points and character beats. It's not yet sophisticated enough for me to feed it my own writing and say, "Show me this in the style of Hemingway, Dickens, and Camus."

Right now, I am most optimistic about AI as an editing software. I'm looking forward to never having to pay a proofreader again. It would also be quite helpful to be able to type a sentence into the AI and ask it to rewrite the sentence in its own words so that I could make sure I'm making sense. I think it's going to lower the barrier of communication for a lot of people with really good ideas who struggle to put them into words so that other people can appreciate them.

My understanding is that blockchain isn't really useful "behind the scenes." It's value is that it can be exposed to the public without being messed with or traced. Banks want everything to be traceable and secret, so they are better off keeping private ledgers. The only reason it is appealing to the mob is because they have to worry about getting exposed, so you can't have a private ledger with a list of all your crimes in a safe in your office the way a bank can.

Even then it seems like you'd rather use your remaining tech for anything that couldn't be replicated by other means.

Basically it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Whatever application ends up being game changing will probably be to a problem we don't even perceive and can't predict (though of course the whole point of this thread is to try so I'm not poo pooping anybody's fun).

My understanding of blockchain technology is that it is a ledger that anybody can edit but nobody can tamper with. I agree with blockchain enthusiasts that this seems like a technology that SHOULD have exciting prospects. Nothing like that has ever existed before. There must be something revolutionary we can do with it.

However as a currency, the only advantage I could see to crypto would be if governments collapsed and you still needed a global exchange to facilitate trade. Unfortunately, exactly the inefficiencies you mention make it impossible to sustain in such a chaotic environment.

It seems like the primary function may well be to facilitate crime. If I understand how it works correctly, then the mafia could, for the first time ever, keep 100% accurate books without risking that they could be turned into evidence. Don Bruno can keep track of exactly how much his cousin Eddy is skimming from the brothel business.

But that application ceases to be valuable if there are no governments enforcing a centralized currency that you can ultimately convert your bitcoins into.

I believe exothermic chemical reactions are how all fossil fuel energy works.

When are we going to fret about AI putting a few artists out of work like it's the end of the world?

I can hold a piece of art. I can look at it and be moved by it. It communicates something from the artist to me, through time and space.

The only thing an NFT can do for me is appreciate in my digital wallet.

If somebody thinks these two things are comparable they are exactly the kind of soulless philistine I was talking about in my first comment.

Yes, both only have as much value as they are perceived to have. One is a line of gibberish and code and the other is an attempt by a fellow human being to bridge the infinite gulf between minds. These are not the same thing just because neither would have value if humans stopped existing (which is true of everything anyway).

NFTs are not the future of any kind of ownership. They will be traded back and forth between rich investors in order to launder money and generate wealth through appreciating value, and the art will be able to stay somewhere that everybody can look at it and appreciate it. The only relationship between NFTs and art is that tasteless people with too much money will spend way too much on them in order to trick people into thinking that they have a soul.

If you speak faster than you type you are either typing too slow or speaking too fast.

Google glass proved that people will not wear wonky headsets walking around most of the time.

But what if you just had an attachment to your phone, like the Apple Watch. Instead of making the glasses the device, it's just a peripheral that you pop on as needed.

Honestly the fact that this doesn't exist yet makes me think I must be overlooking some major downside.

I think we'll do less and less of the actual computing on our persons. Carrying around a device with the processing power of a smartphone will be unusual. I think the average consumer would prefer a sturdy, reliable device that lets them browse the internet, message, take pictures, and listen to their music without having to be updated every twelve months. I think they would even be willing to sacrifice speed, as long as the network was reliable.

The fact is most people don't need all of the features of their smartphones today. They have those features because developers have to justify their paychecks, not because they are actually useful. If society manages to survive long enough for stable, reliable internet to be accessible in most places in a given country, I expect smartphones will decline in popularity rather than continue expanding.

Maybe YOU know some reliable ones, but vending machines are more famous for breaking down than for delivering food. The other thing they're famous for is delivering shitty food. Maybe some company someday will change that, but probably not Subway.

I definitely do not put money into a vending machine unless I am OK with losing it.

"Are vending machines typically known for breaking down?"

You can't possibly be serious with this.

Increased complexity in an established system is fine if it conveys advantages. If it doesn't it's just one more thing to go wrong. These seem shortsighted to me. I doubt they will replace actual sandwich shops. They will appear in the same places that vending machines already appear and serve the same purpose, and they will be broken most of the time, just like current vending machines.

It's just a vending machine with more parts to break.

If the Thrillist article isn't a paid advertisement, I'll eat my shoe, because it will taste better than anything I can get at Subway.

If OP is not getting paid by Subway then shame on you. Don't work for free.

Is the risk of food poisoning from cookies so great that this is a useful thing to do? Seems like most food poisoning comes from either veggies that were contaminated by the soil and then left unwashed or processed meat like hamburger. Controlling the production line of baked goods seems relatively easy by comparison. I highly doubt safety tracking is a worthwhile use of this technology. The bar code on the packaging does a better job of that because the poisoned person didn't eat the evidence.