Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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".)

We don't have dumb AI because we are afraid to 'let them off the chain.' This is pretty much it for LLMs in terms of capability. 'Agentic' might get a little better at some point but it isn't going to be 'real AI' without years of user data, years of training, and as-of-yet non-existent technology.

As for your question... I deny the premise. There is nothing to stop anyone if it is possible to do a thing. Right now, for the cost of a car, if a person had the knowledge and will, they could buy a synth bio lab for their garage and build a pandemic. You, just like so many others, could build a truck bomb capable of destroying a building. People regularly design destructive computer software as a hobby. People, mostly but not only Americans, can acquire guns and shoot dozens of people before anyone can stop them. There is literally no direct way to prevent any of these things. The thing that keeps us from having massive attacks every day is simply not many people have the inclination.

my bad, it's not considered tech. Removed.

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.

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.

nanobots that fly up your arse and tickle your walnut. fuckin society man

A pill or vaccine that will cure everything and enable you to live longer and healthier.

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.

True all you can eat buffets.

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