Stuff I Want

Here are some of the technologies that I would like to see really take off yet in my lifetime:

Life Extension - While I don't necessarily want to live forever, I'm nowhere close to bored yet, and I think I could easily keep myself amused with the things I'm already interested in for at least a few hundred more years.  But my cells aren't optimized for that kind of span, and there are enough external sources of creeping degradation (random cancer cell clusters, environmental toxicity, sub-optimal diet and lifestyle) that I'll be lucky at my current pace to make it past 100 years.  But these are largely engineering problems, and if enough of them can be solved, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to live a few hundred years, killed off almost exclusively by sudden accidents.  The societal impact of this is a whole other discussion, but if I can have my biological age cleanly reset to 25 years old, I would be happy to have my social security eligibility also reset to 25...

Automated Transportation - There are a LOT of people working on self-driving cars.  The idea of having the flexibility and convenience of automobile transportation together with the someone-else-doing-the-work aspect of riding a train or bus really appeals to me.  On top of which, even though regular car usage kills tens of thousands of people a year, any automated technology won't be accepted until fatalities are virtually eliminated.  So not only will I be able to ride anywhere I want while doing whatever I'd like sitting there, the likelihood of being killed while doing so will be far less than any road trip involving human drivers.

Less Stuff - When I was younger I felt that material possession was a symptom of success.  I have, over the years, come to believe more and more that your stuff owns you far more than you own it.  And even with that belief, I'm writing this at a desk piled with random bits of debris from my life, including several cameras, a digital audio recorder, three loose hard drives, two MP3 players, various office supplies, three headsets, and at least 500 pieces of paper.  I can pare down or efficiently store the electronics, but the paper is just unnecessary.  I don't really want paper, I want data.  And while there are already online bill payment mechanisms and online document storage and online information management systems of all sorts, we aren't quite there yet.  I would like getting a piece of paper to become the exception, and instead I just receive a secure, verifiable, digitally timestamped piece of data.

Clean Energy - We are rapidly coming up on the end of the age of oil, one way or another.  There's still a lot of coal left, but that is still taking carbon out of the ground and dumping it in the air.  We really need a clean efficient energy solution.  Ultimately, it seems that it is going to be either direct nuclear (preferably fusion), or indirect nuclear, which is to say, solar.  There has been a huge increase in solar energy production in the last few years, and the curve is getting steeper, but it is still a tiny fraction of our total consumption.  There are also several related technologies that need to mature in addition to production.  We need efficient storage and transport, and we need more efficient usage of what we do produce.  There are almost no incandescent bulbs left in my home, and in a few more years, I expect I'll have started to go toward LEDs.  It will be interesting to see if my first self-driving car (see above) is also entirely electric...

Of course there will be false starts, and development in directions that we can't even begin to imagine right now.  There will also be lots of unintended consequences, some of which may have the potential to kill us all.  But there's some of my wish list items.  How about you?  Leave a comment with the technologies you want to see come to fruition...