Realistically?

• Housing that doesn't cost a fortune

• Healthcare that doesn't bankrupt you

• Food that's both affordable and worth eating

None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.

I thought VR/AR would be farther along. There was a pitch 10 years ago that VR would be the “final platform” in that anything a phone, TV, tablet, or computer could do could be easily emulated in VR.

Unfortunately it’s still all walled gardens. Also nobody wants to wear that shit for more than an hour.

LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.

It's 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments...

I understand that it's probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.

But it's still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.

When I was a kid in the 80s I thought we'd absolutely have some kind of moon base by now. More space stuff in general. What is more "future" than space?

Green energy is maybe 10 years behind where younger me would have wished it to be, it feels we're close to some big breakthroughs. I'm still hopefully to see some game changing things in my lifetime.

Better general medical science. So much of what we use is very old tech. We still can't regrow cartligage. We still pin bones together with titanium screws. We still mostly use fiberglass casts (though better alternatives exist). We still catch the common cold.

I thought we'd have affordable 8TB SSD's.

Ability to live in balance with the earth

• Genetic-level diagnoses and treatments.

• Inexpensive, rapid genome sequencing.

• Commonplace genetic counselling for more than just pregnancy.

• Laws in place to govern the collection, use, ownership, and patenting of human genes and genetic information.

• Cloned tissues (i.e. blood, skin), organs (i.e. heart, lungs, kidneys) for transplant or repair.

I graduated university the same year the Human Genome Project first published completion. Certainly, that project uncovered more questions than answers.

Also, we've done an absolutely garbage job of becoming appropriate stewards of this technology. Primarily, today, it would be used to identify, segregate, subjugate, and eventually kill a portion of the population.

Compassion, empathy, socialism.

Fusion lol.

Better space tech or at least a moon base.

Modular body parts like in cyberpunk

Computer phones. As in I just connect to screen and keyboard, and phone is my main desktop.

Cheaper EVs.

Working lab fusion.

Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets

More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it's just accepted. I've grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It's not novel if it's broken.

Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.

Phones that can be opened up and have internals replaced, like desktop computers

I thought we would finally have haptic touch in our devices. There were some experiments in the past, but it never happened outside of niche industry applications.

Makes me a little bit sad, because being able to feel elements is really useful - I can type blind on my Titan 2 phone (which has a real keyboard) and in cars, it would really improve safety.

Level 4 self driving cars.

I definitely thought we’d have Ar glasses by now

Hoverboards.

Windshield wipers that don't smear.

Self driving cars. Ten years ago I said, "we'll have this worked out in 10 years". What a fool I was.

A cure for all diseases and illnesses.

Recycling that actually works.

I thought that by now we would've commercialized at scale alternative battery technologies. We're still using lithium ion even for grid storage and EV's.

Also, I expected we would have put a man on the moon by now.

Standardized connector for everything with backwards compatibility

I was hoping that by now technology and education would have helped all the humans to realize how to take care of each other and work together for a better tomorrow.

Instead we got this fucking mess that's going on right now all around the world.

Maglev trains in the US