Don't you think now is not that different from the past as you expected when you were a child? Futurology

This is not a serious thread, but just a light rant. All right, I have not contributed anything to the advancement of any technologies, so it is not that I am blaming others, but it is just that now is not the exiting future I was expecting in the 1980's.

If I could somehow show the current world to 1980's myself, 1980's myself would not be that surprised and probably understand most of the new things in a day or so without much astonishment. Far from the 2020's I saw in TV shows of 1980's. In short, everything other than computers got just slightly better, and even for computers, they just got faster so things that we already knew how to implement but could not have done so due to processing speed are now possible, but other than that, computers are not different from 1980's.

Cars look more or less the same. The do have some small GPS guidance device, but it is not that surprising or magical. There are not K.I.T.T. like cars or hovering cars. Most of them are still driven by humans and using petroleum. I have heard of self-driving cars, but I cannot imagine when a fully automatic cars (that you do not have to drive at all) will be of the price of current cars.

There are no human-like robots. No, Google Assistant does not seem to have a human-like A.I. I have a Google Home, and it feels to me that it just a very complicated and long if/else programming, than it actually understands me even at a 5-year old child-level. It does not understand or respond like a human. It says the same things over and over again; it does not understand even a simple question, if it is an unusual question that the engineers in Google did not expect. I have lowered my expectations and am using it mostly just for simple things like asking time/weather, setting timers.

Houses look the same. Refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines look the same. There are some "smart" ones with just basic Wi-Fi capability, but in my standard they are still dumb. And they are not even prevalent.

There are not so many diseases that were impossible to cure in the 1980's but now are curable. I mean, we still die from cancers, Dentistry is still using drills. We still cannot even eradicate simple viruses like herpes that hide inside our body.

Ray Kurzweil predicted a fundamentally different world in 2045 (27 years from now). I can hardly believe it. Yeah, he says acceleration of changes, but it feels more like an excuse. I kind of expect the year 2045 would not be that different from now, other than we have some faster/smaller computers.

Submitted January 16, 2018 at 05:34PM by evolution2015 http://ift.tt/2DbXlf7 Futurology