I hope we’ve outpaced the imagination of somebody from 50 freaking years ago. Imagine how the 1970s would look to somebody from the 1920s.
We got most of the tech from the jetsons ppl could envision in the early 1960s (video calls, smartphones, smart watches, smart homes), but still don’t have flying cars, cloud cities, robot maids, and moving sidewalks going everywhere.
I have a robot maid, it just only vacuums and mops. They have them with an arm that can pick up light objects too, they are just expensive.
They are working on robot maids that basically are controlled by humans and see and record EVERYTHING in your house. Not a good idea.
Any smartphone is the obvious one.
But, the first black hole was confirmed in 1971. The fact that we’ve taken a picture of one would be incredible, not to mention directly imaging planets in other solar systems.
“Cordless” isn’t much of a word anymore because everything runs on batteries. Battery tech itself has come a long way.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin… And I still marvel everyday about where we are today, compared to last year 😁 And I’m here since the internet began, and I had to drive to neighbor-city, be interviewed, fill out forms, join a nonprofit, just to have access to it.
I’m in awe every time I look at my e.g. phone. A thing that is a factor of like a hundred thousand or more in terms of speed, resolution, storage, in comparison to my first computer. And I carry it around. And it can connect to the net at unbelievable speeds. Without a cable.
…yet websites often load slower than back then, thanks to lazy devs, the use of 5838229 frameworks or scripts noone needs and also tracking and the likes.
The Patch was hypothesized in 1988 and first documented in 1997, by a passing yacht racer. Research on the patch began in earnest in 2009.
Estimates on the size are still nebulous, as it continues to expand and shift. But I doubt anyone in the 1970s was predicting a patch of trash twice the size of Texas would appear in the Pacific Ocean over the next 50 years.
- there’s now scientists working on myco-remediation creating controlled fungi that can eat plastics and polymers. 🤓
What happens if this fungi comes in contact with humans full of microplastics?
Then you get a cleansing and then you go to the er and call yourself a dumbass and then hope to god the intravenous antifungal work.
No, honestly I don’t know but you can buy a syringe of liquid culture that contains a strain of a plastic eating mushroom and the warning on the site is to not store it in a plastic fridge. You could find the plastic pile and then toss a jar of that culture on it and then toss your boat because it’s probably been hit with the liquid culture.
This was actually renamed to the Great American Garbage Patch
Also wish more effort and attention went into countries coming together to clean this up, and simultaneously stop any new trash from entering into our waters.
Trump renamed something again?!
I’d have to imagine, if they were also into art, that they’d absolutely flip put over the tools for digital art, 3D modeling, and 3D printing. I mean, you can make a miniature 3D model for a project, make some textures to slap on it so you can get an idea of how you want it to look, print it, and then paint it to look like your textured model. All from your house, no less.
Though, for animation nerds, definitely the jump in animation quality. I wasn’t alive back then, but when I look back at cartoons from then, I notice a few of cheap things occasionally used like solid colour backgrounds, stiff character movement, and repeated animations in certain areas to save on budget. Plus, the stories being told are a lot better, IMO, in general… despite some of the crud we get alongside the cream of the crop.
I think a 1970s American would get a kick out these:
- Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it’s not going to be addressed.
- Those gas prices are going no where but up.
- Anyway we decided that all cars will be F350s.
- I hope you like pocket electronics because those are literally the only things that will seem truly futuristic to you. Everything else? Pretty much the same. Yep. We don’t even live longer.
1992 born but I’ve said to my mom crazy how nothings changed. Updated to work the same as before but other than that attempts to change everything is a major flaw.
I was born in the early 80s. Things HAVE changed big time. A lot of things that we do not see on a daily basis that have changed majorly. Medical tech is one. most people do not work in the medical field and do not pay much attention to it (I am one of them!) but the sheer amount of stuff that has changed in medicine is staggering.
Like transportation hasn’t changed though. It’s all update to function exactly the same.
Not everything has stayed the same but a few things of our daily lives that we thought were going to be mroe extravagant or technology driven aren’t and now some of the things that have technologocal advances we wonder why the fuck they need them, like toasters. Why the fuck does a toaster need Bluetooth?
There’s things that are slightly futuristic, like lightbulbs that don’t really burn out and barely need power to run, or antidepressants that don’t completely fuck you up. But yeah, in the 1970s they’d kind of maxxed out what’s physically possible with a lot of technologies, while they were still projecting linear growth like they’d seen over previous decades.
Now I’m curious how high gas prices got in the 70’s oil crises, in 2026 dollars. Uhhh… looks like it was comparable to now, actually.
Ah, ah, ah, “we” decided?
Energy Crisis 2.0
Not related to technology. Walking into an airport to greet or to say Bon Voyage to people at the gate!!! Now, the fucking things are like prisons!
Running to tell the woman you love to stay, before being tazed to the ground and put on a no fly list.
LLMs - you can just talk to your computer. I used computers since the 90s and that has always been the ultimate scifi dream and it’s here.
I wouldn’t say that’s crazier than a 70’s nerds wildest dreams. In the 70’s they thought talking to your computer was just around the corner. They would more likely be amazed that it took so long.
You can talk to dumb chatbots since the nineties. Now they can into grammar, wow.
(I know they are way better now. But the basic fact stands.)
I remember cleverbot back in the day, and thinking that was peak.
They did that on ST:TOS.
As much as I have a love-hate relationship with these because of all the negative effects (And there are countless ones), it’s quite impressive what current Frontier models can do at this time, with very little input.
That we live inside a dystopia that is a pretty even mix of Brave Nee World and 1984.
Ugh.
CT and MRI
i saw this on r/futurology
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3367612/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-smallest-ct-scanner-weighing-just-6kg“The device can be held in one hand and is the world’s smallest and lightest CT system, earning it the nickname ‘palm-sized CT scanner’,” Liu Baodong, a senior engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and general manager of Rayim, told the Science and Technology Daily on Monday.
The machine had a spatial resolution of 80 micrometres, roughly the width of a human hair, and could analyse objects from snail shells to medicine capsules, Liu said.
It consumed only about 200 watts, which meant it could be powered by an ordinary portable power bank during fieldwork, he said."
This is the hot shit as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon-counting_computed_tomography
i believe that CT&MRI are also used in research. which i think is really great.
in clinical diagnostic setting, the imaging is for a single case and privacy protected… whereas in research, it is greenlighted and maximally designed for greater good of medicine.
I got to thinking about like, Amazon. To an American in 1970, the equivalent would have been Sears, the retailer that sells literally everything though an enormous catalog. They had department stores you could visit in person and they’d publish a phone book thick catalog for mail order. And there was a time that Sears could have bought Amazon outright for chump change. I remember a Tim Allen stand-up routine where he talks about mail ordering a tool from Sears, and it arrives 6 to 8 weeks later. Shipping is now usually a matter of 1-4 days.
But no, the real answer is probably wireless headphones. Like if you were showing around a tech enthusiast from 1975 around my house, the thing that would probably break his brain the most is a pair of wireless earbuds.
Indeed, Sears had every chance to become Amazon. I kind of miss my old Sony Walkman with the foam earpads.
Unfortunately they don’t sound near as good. Maybe in the future they will.
Compared to a lot of headphones available in the 1970’s they sound amazing.
Not so sure about that claim. In the 70s everything was analogue. Bluetooth can barely do mp3 quality let alone CD which is still far from full analogue tape. Many headphone from back them line Sennheiser HD 414, Koss Pro/4AA, and Stax SR-X blow away anything some makes now
Allow me to re-state, with emphasis:
Compared to
A LOT
of headphones available in the 1970’s, they sound amazing.
Yeah, there’s been good audio gear for decades, but there was also utter garboleum.
My issue was back then things got better every year. People chased sound quality. Now people use Bluetooth and listen to music mixed on a laptop with autotune.
Christians of Lemmy: You think your god would have bothered creating the universe if he knew it would inevitably lead to the existence of audiophiles?
Let me guess it’s okay to appreciate good food. It’s okay to appreciate sweet touching. But it’s not okay to appreciate good audio. Gotcha
All video graphics after Pong’s.
deleted by creator
Graphics
Graphics.
Huh. I must have really read that one wrong earlier.
The Nazis are back.
They never left
I don’t think you comprehend the words “wildest dreams” in the title…
the punks tried to warn us
