Realistically?
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Housing that doesn’t cost a fortune
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Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you
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Food that’s both affordable and worth eating
None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.
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I thought VR/AR would be farther along. There was a pitch 10 years ago that VR would be the “final platform” in that anything a phone, TV, tablet, or computer could do could be easily emulated in VR.
Unfortunately it’s still all walled gardens. Also nobody wants to wear that shit for more than an hour.
Brain implants are progressing, so I’m still hopeful to see full-dive VR in my lifetime. Also scared of how it will be enshtitfied.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It’s 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments…
I understand that it’s probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it’s still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
Something is wrong with the ones you’re buying, then.
Studies show that they do, on average, last dozens of times longer. Personally I replace them way less often than incandescent.
I suppose the earliest ones were worse and there are definitely garbage ones out there. And even good brands have a did here and there. And if you have poor/inconsistent power, or placing them in hot, enclosed fixtures, they don’t perform as well as they could.
Who were the studies done by? Philips?
no hot filaments…
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don’t even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won’t exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling ‘boob’ light).
I’ve been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee’s basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I’m a pretty small sample size. I know I’m paying a premium for that approach, but it’s not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
Oh that’s a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
This is common (engineered predictable fault.)
The Phoebus Cartel was objectively terrible, but it turns out there are perfectly good engineering reasons to limit them to 1000 hours. It has to do with the chemistry of tungsten. Those bulbs that last forever give off exceedingly little light, and the 1000 hour rule is from a standard that predates the cartel.
I thought we’d have affordable 8TB SSD’s.
Better general medical science. So much of what we use is very old tech. We still can’t regrow cartligage. We still pin bones together with titanium screws. We still mostly use fiberglass casts (though better alternatives exist). We still catch the common cold.
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Genetic-level diagnoses and treatments.
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Inexpensive, rapid genome sequencing.
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Commonplace genetic counselling for more than just pregnancy.
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Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.
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Cloned tissues (i.e. blood, skin), organs (i.e. heart, lungs, kidneys) for transplant or repair.
I graduated university the same year the Human Genome Project first published completion. Certainly, that project uncovered more questions than answers.
Also, we’ve done an absolutely garbage job of becoming appropriate stewards of this technology. Primarily, today, it would be used to identify, segregate, subjugate, and eventually kill a portion of the population.
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More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it’s just accepted. I’ve grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It’s not novel if it’s broken.
Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.
Ability to live in balance with the earth
