A battery powered table saw.
Absolutely not a thing in the 1980’s, in stock now at your local Lowe’s.
That one does blow me away - I’ve had a cordless drill for years, but a tablesaw??? - when I realized they even existed I couldn’t believe it.
I mean, when you think about it, it’s just a battery-powered circular saw flipped upside-down. Not too crazy to consider like that.
Battery powered circular saws were also science fiction the day I was born.
Go watch early seasons of The New Yankee Workshop and look for the cordless power drill he uses in the first couple of seasons. It’s got this gigantic permanently attached battery hanging out of the hand grip (the hand grip is like a foot long) and it can just barely turn a wood screw.
By the time I was in high school tiny, underpowered circ saws were available that ran on drill batteries. These things had like 5 inch ultrathin blades. Now look at it.
The first battery powered drills were pretty horrible. Batteries have come a long way
A cure for AIDS
I’m out of the loop, is that a thing? Best I know is that it’s highly manageable with treatment, not cured.
5th person confirmed cured of HIV. Stem cell transplant, apparently. Happened in Düsseldorf if your .de means anything.
Fascinating!
Nah, my .de means nothing, it was just an arbitrary choice of instance for me.
Achieving a world record in this day and age, which I have at least one of.
Burning a CD while using your computer for something else in the mean time.
That’s come full circle as many modern machines don’t even have disc drives anymore
Back in the 90s part of my job was to change the daily backup tape on a computer when I got there in the morning. It was an 8GB cassette the size of a deck of cards, and I remember marveling that I could carry 8 Gigabytes in my shirt pocket. Now you can get thumb drives for $20 that hold many times more, and thousands of times more than my first hard drive. (which cost about a grand)
Lol, that seems like a pain. God bless robotic tape libraries.
Phones doing a good chunk of what computers can
A good chunk? My watch is far more capable than my first computer, many times the storage, and its screen has more pixels
I mean it’s almost wrong handed to call something like an iPhone or Android device a “phone” because it’s really a pocket computer that, among many other things, can place phone calls.
For that reason, I like how they are called Hand Terminals in the Expanse (books, I dont think they are referred to at all in the show)
Combined with the Internet a “phone” - as we still charmingly call it - does what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could do.
Wireless power transfer/charging. The only thing even alluding to it being possible when I was growing up, was Nikola Tesla’s work; and most people thought most of his ideas were bunk.
Im surprised to see this pop up multiple times. If my device more or less is still plugged in with wireless chargers (as it can’t really be “off” the pad) it’s really not that impressive to me. Not to mention we’ve been pumping power through the air since the first radio.
If my device could charge anywhere within a certain radius (feet/meters), that would be impressive.
I sometimes wonder if tesla was successful in his expiements but realized how it could be quickly weaponized or has some other moral implications so that he destroyed all his research.
Telling the “computer” to do a thing and it just does. AI has it’s upsides and saves me so much time and energy
For real. Who would have guessed the most realistic prediction from Star Trek was talking directly to the computer. Whereas the least realistic one is that a post-scarcity society would benefit average people.
Electing a convicted felon President of the United States.
That one cuts deep. It’s really weird too because if you asked your parents they would say america would never elect a felon. Then they went on to elect a felon.
I sometimes think about trying to reach out to order folks to better understand their views but they I remember the absolute garbage brain rot they believe.
In my pocket I carry a library of Alexandria, an infinite Walk-man, a camera and a camcorder with effectively infinite film, a personal navigator… You get the idea, the list goes on. 80s me would have thought this was impossible, even if I am a bit disappointed about the flying car and hoverboard situation.
… a calculator, an electronic translator, an alarm clock, a video games console, an infinite DVD player, a spirit level, a personal weather forecaster, …
oh and I also think it can make telephone calls
Teleportation
It was proven on a micro scale by Jeff Kimble’s team at CalTech (?) in the late 90s I think
Considering how many asterisks you need to add there, I wouldn’t say teleportation is “inevitable”.
I’m not sure quantum entanglement is indicative of teleportation but don’t know much about it. Would be cool to learn more.
US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.
And literal nazis marching in the streets
Child me is just dying to have the dancing and gaming skills I have!
Child me wishes he had the basic communication skills and treatments for his mental illness.
A computer program winning a Go tournament.
In chess, human grandmasters routinely beat the best computers, but changing that was simply a matter of faster processors and larger memory, problems solvable by the application of sufficient quantities of money. In principle the game was already solved, and within a few decades, would be solved in practice as well.
Go was considered a much harder problem. Programs of similar complexity to a decent chess program couldn’t even look at a finished game between go pros and reliably say who won, let alone get there itself. Well, guess what?
Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.
The fall of America.
Well that was just hubris.
