I think VR remains a gimmick and people are immersed enough just starting into a computer/TV screen.

A more useful advance would just be better interfaces, the TV/monitor part does pretty good and pocket computers will remain more useful than headset computers because you don't have to wear them on your face to use them.

VR has the problem is making it too hard to share what you're going with a group, so it will continue to have adopting problems. Plus it's competing against cheap 4k screens that do a pretty darn good job already.

Like I'd rather have a three monitor setup where the game can pan across monitors than VR because I can set at a desktop with monitors far more comfortably for far longer than I can wear a display on my face.

Well.. quantum chips aren't making huge gains to consider game changing yet, but to be fair we don't know what any tech can really do until we've created it and started playing with it.

I just see real AI as not having a ton of uses compared to just simple things like funding new drug and novel material designs using good ol fashion machine learning.

Yeah it's neat you can draw using fake AI/machine learning, but things like that are not as important as cancer vaccines and graphene nano structures, for instance.

AI is cool, but robotics actually does a lot more. Humans are fairly smart and imaginative, so AI isn't that great compared to machine learning.

We need things that assemble puzzles for us more than we need AI than can do basic human thought... because we already have more than enough humans to do that, it's the huge variable problems where humans have to coordinate thought together that we see the biggest benefit from machine learning/AI.

2023.. for a most impactful advance? Probably medicine and materials sciences.

One of the fields most sped up recently by machine learning is drug candidates and new molecule candidate in general because machine learning as been very VERY effective in modeling new drug and molecule candidates so we will see the result as a much higher/faster rate of getting experimental drugs and novel materials that use to take WAY more lab work and kind of like random guessing.

Instead of so much lab work and guessing the computer models narrow down these high variable puzzles and unlike some of the more popular questions that dominate out minds like.. how did the universe start or how did life originate these modeling advances produce a lot of real world outcomes.. so you get real results rather faster.

None of that is going to happen just by the 2030s.

Religion will survive just fine because society will get more and more automated and humans will get more and more detached from reality as they have less and less responsibility.

We are headed for an Idiocracy/Avenue 5 future.

I would doubt that we've seen the peak in ice yet because there's still so many people in developing nations that probably still want the cheapest cars they can get and lack of charging stations and robust grids won't help.

It's possible but probably not in a good way so much as it would mean an extended global recession where only the wealthier people can afford cars... And then that period lasted long enough that the cost for EVS falls below the cost of internal combustion engines globally which then would be certainly the decline of ICE.

We can dream, but I'll have to see real world LCOE stats before I start accepting Fusion as a cheap option. Until then it has horrible LCOE because it's all investments and no power output.

Nuclear has such a long history of claiming much cheaper costs than it winds up producing and with such high complexity I have my doubts it willproduce wind/solar level cheap energy.

Same thing happened with fission. On paper it was much cheaper than averaged real life costs. Plus nuclear LCOE doesn't take real long term waste storage or inevitable accidents into account. They are cheating LCOE pretty hard on the nuclear side just like the fossil fuel side and all it's externalized long term costs.

Also the problem of just convincing a country that can't build nuclear reactors to switch a huge chunk of its power generation over to nuclear reactors and then be completely dependent on one or a handful of countries that can maintain those reactors. As well as venting the countries making Fusion reactions to export to developing nations.

On Paper those obstacles might not look huge, but I'm pretty sure they are.

Of fusion can produce a levelized cost of energy around $25 per megawatt hour then it will at least be a good option for the handful of countries that can build the reactors, but I doubt it will scale out globally.

Try to think about it like you're the developing country and America has highly proprietary power plant design that it wants you to invest in and will require you to basically stay in America's favor or not be able to fix your own power plants.

Humans have no real AI and certainly no super AI yet so your jumping the gun there.

The universe is really big and full of obstructions, not super old compared to Earth.

We could still easily be one of the first successful intelligent species. We have no metric to judge our ability to guess how common intelligent life really is. Intelligent life might kill itself off about at the level of development we are now or perhaps most intelligent life does not get as intelligent as rapidly as humans did.

Sending radio signals that far and having them recognizable might also be much harder than we are imaging unless your fairly close.

There is no huge mystery here in the sense that we don't already have good enough explanations, we just have no way to check our work and be anywhere near confident in our guesses when where the only example of intelligent life of even a habital planet.

Maybe a better question to ask is why would we think we know that much about the universe when we haven't even found a single other really habital looking planet.

As awesome as the big shots of nebulas and galactic clusters look, when we try to zoom into something as small as a planet we get little more than a blury pixel at any large distance. There's no reason to be surprised when you're only at the and blurry pixel stage that you haven't been able to comb the entire universe for intelligent life.

The one major problem with this question in general is that initially we assumed unbelievable high amount of planets could be habitable that probably aren't because they're just too close to the center of galaxies. That has lead us constantly assumed with zero proof that we should be seeing all this life even in our own galaxy.

I will take the opposite approach and say that intelligent life is so rare your lucky to have more than one intelligent species per galaxy and beyond that communication between distant galaxies is harder than we think. Prove me wrong!

I will also interpret the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion versus the universe at 13 billion to suggest that there's only been a relative short amount of time for development when you consider it took 4.5 billion years for the biosphere to form and give intelligent life a chnace of happening.

Its too Easy to look at just humans development of intelligence and theorize that it could happen quickly, but there's no actual proof of that and really there's only proof that it takes about 4.5 billion years.

We may very well be some of the first .. to survive to this level of development in the visable universe for all we know at this point.... Once you solve all those questions then you can worry about the implications of artificial intelligence!

You have to be careful with efficiencies though the only important metric is really cost usually because I mean keep in mind like a solar panel is only 20% efficient but it's super cheap so who cares.

I suspect being unhappy for any reason will correlate with depression.

There's no sign that quantum computing is about to become viable for breaking most encryption.

It's much easier to keep current encryption levels up thanit is to make quantum chips.

Quantum enhanced machine learning might give machine learning more depth and adaptability across many fields.

I don't think many ppl would want to. It's a neat idea, but being launched into space with anything like current tech and living in low G for any extended period of time sucks. Moon dust also clings to everything and space suits don't look fun.

Soo.. based on current tech and biological limits I'd say no chnace for moon tourism in just 100 years.

We need safer ways to get in and out of orbit and ideally far better artificial gravity.

The only space tourism I see as practical is a near earth cruise orbit, but not available to the masses and still very dangerous putting lots of ppl on one ship.

I think most people would be more interested in some high resolution VR experience that simulates the visuals well.

Potentially have brain to computer interfaces that could deliver really deep VR in 100 years.

I think at the rate we're going we're going to have the ability to copy the human brain into a machine before we have the propulsion and artificial gravity technology we need for Mass market space tourism.

AND THEN You will have a humanity that can really travel into space and survive all kinds of environment because they’re not tied to their squishy little biological body.

So I'm in a minority of current thinking where I say that we will have the ability to copy the human brain into a digital format long before we have the ability to travel easily through space and that ability to copy the human brain will become the primary mechanism that lets us explore space.

Think a lot of astrophysicists and other futurists really haven't fully considered that option seriously enough, but there's a lot more benefits in being able to copy a human brain into a machine than there is making complex space ships aka it solves a lot more problems and benefits the average human far more.