To think all the best ideas have now been thought off?

[dottypotter]

Do you think all the technology ideas like FB, Twitter, Deliveroo, Dating Websites, Friends Reunited airbnb, and so on have all been taken now.
Does anyone wonder what the next big thing will be or has it all been thought of now?
What are we missing if anything?

The Metaverse and NFTs are going to be the next big boom. No more shopping on websites - you’ll be able to put on a headset and walk around the store. And literally everything will be a NFT, from your birth certificate to your bank account. AI is going to be huge too - there are already AIs which can write poems, answer questions, generate images and 3D models from a verbal description of what you want it to look like.

Other innovations coming soon: Solar planes which are a midway point between traditional aeroplanes and satellites. They’ll stay in the air for up to a year and will be used for reconnaissance and atmospheric sampling etc, and to bring internet to third world countries. These already exist but the maximum flight time is about a month or two. Household robots - these already exist too but they need to be cheaper and more useful. And did you see NASA DART the other week - the first test of an interplanetary defence system.

In terms of more boring things, literally everything we use needs to be redesigned to be more eco friendly and renewable, and not use fossil fuels or petrochemicals. And the war with Russia has demonstrated that countries need to be more self sufficient in future, we need to reinstate manufacturing and farming etc instead of outsourcing it abroad.

What I would love is if you could point your phone or another device at some food and it would tell you if it contained something you were allergic to.

NFTs blow my mind - doesn’t matter how much I try to understand, it seems to make no sense!!

There will be a big leap in personal medical diagnostic tools. There already has a little, but using your phone to scan moles, your eyes, measure what is in your sweat will be the next thing.

I hope there will be a big leap forward in the way we work because teams meetings for 6 hours a day are currently killing my soul.

This reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) quote attributed to the Commissioner of the US Patent office in 1899- "Everything that can be invented, has been invented" 😁

This already exists, it just isn’t commercially available yet.

www.sensogenic.com

I think that research is ongoing, same as driverless cars.

@WishingWell5 I love your son!
If I'm still around when he's grown up, I'll be happy to donate to his project! :-)

Tbh I'd be happy if we could run things properly that we have already got. Bloody trains, post, customer service.. :-0 Don't get me started on the lack of buses lately.

There's more to come.

Some guy famously said the same thing in around 1810 or something... look how wrong he was.

Although due to the state of the planet, I do wonder if the past 40 years or so will be seen as a period of gross excess. Huge quantities and choice of sugar laden junk food, massive gas guzzling cars, lights constantly on in every room (have noticed this lately in a lot of film/tv either filmed or set in the 80s / 90s); fast fashion; cheap international air travel.

I do think a lot of these things will be coming to an end.

Technology is great but it does scare me how fast it has all gone.

I look at photos sometimes of people on nights out and see people sitting at a table / in a pub etc, all glued to their phones. It looks weird to me and I wonder if it'll look even weirder to people in the future, maybe (hopefully) as soon as the next generation.

I think about how much time I spend on my phone vs 10 or 15 years ago and find it horrifying.

I read that as "smell this seal" 🦭

No thanks

Also i can remember when dvds came out, replacing VHS, thinking "it doesn't get better than this...this can't be improved on" 😂

Whenever you think of someone like Mark Zuckerberg who came up with FB you think why didn't I think of that but you never did.
Helps I think if you have a good background in computers and what's needed.
Friends Reunited was great for them. They sold ot for loads of money and are living rich somewhere and you wouldn't know who they are. A simple idea started as a hobby from home. Lucky them.

No there are a huge amount of possibilities.

I think of them all the time. I thought of Peleton years before Peleton became available and I think of tons more all the time.

Actually implementing the ideas and bringing them to market is far more tricky.

Those people out glued to their phones ?

Like this …. One of my favourite pics I’ve taken of ‘unsocial media’

How about being able to transform yourself to a beach abroad and feel the sun on you. Bliss.

There's plenty of room for innovation in the field of medicine - cures for all the things we can't cure now - treatments that don't have terrible side-effects. Advances in reconstructive surgery and prostheses. A way of actually killing viruses rather than just inhibiting them. Advances in our understanding of the human mind - better ways to manage or even cure mental illness. Artificial replacement organs. And all this being available to be produced at low cost.

Tbh you could proper easy take picture like this of my dh and I when we sit down in a cafe, catch up on messages quickly or search where it is we were bloody supposed to be actually 😂

I have a very clever nephew who has a company in the field of ultrahaptics. Difficult to explain, but I'll try. Imagine a grid of sound generators emitting high frequency, say a grid 100 by 100(bit like pixels on a screen). By programming each generator to issue sounds of different frequencies and volume they can make 3d shapes, so if you put your hand above the grid, you can feel a shape, sphere, pyramid, cube, that isn't there but feels like it is. Now shrink the generators down, make a grid of 10,000 by 10,000 and you can refine the quality of the shape you can feel. So in a car, you have a touch screen, that you don't have to touch but you can feel a switch, or knob a few cm in front of the screen. On an AI game, you will be able to pick an item up and it will feel right, weight and texture. They had a demo on tv a few years ago using it as a training aid for vets. The only way for a vet to learn how to help a cow give birth, is for them to put the rubber gloves, and practice on a real cow. On the programme, they had an artifical rear end of a cow, with the ultrahaptic set up behind. The students stuck there hand up the orifice and they were able to simulate breech birth, normal birth and anything in between. My imagination doesn't stretch any further but the possibilties are huge.

Innovation and breakthroughs are happening all the time, but are often out of the public eye. I work in a technology type area and there is so much going on, particularly in renewable energies.

Nanotechnology, in particular applications in medicine and targeted drug delivery. Also artificial intelligence. Two very fast-moving fields

Artificial Intelligence. Next question?

I'm still waiting for someone to invent a cure for hang-overs!

A home printer that actually prints would be mind blowing!! 🤯

Yes, and printer cartridges that last more than five minutes and don't cost the earth.

Yep, that too!!