Room-temperature superconductivity is just around the corner. Scientists have found a few materials now which superconduct at room or near-room temperatures at extremely high pressures, meaning the ball is squarely in the court of engineers to find a way to have those same materials exist at more moderate pressures (e.g. by doping or strain engineering).

For what it's worth, I think the next major breakthrough will either be genetic engineering and genome editing that will drastically increase people's lifespan, or it'll be new battery technologies that will match and then vastly surpass the pound-for-pound energy density of petrol or diesel fuel. Once we've got that cracked and are able to refuel EVs as conveniently as petrol cars and give them the same kind of range with a battery pack that's no bigger than a 60-litre petrol tank, that's when EV technology will really take off. It will also mean that cars will weigh less, which again increases efficiency. And you could make smaller batteries more plug-and-play, so that you won't have to replace the entire underside of your car when the batteries wear out. A battery swap could then be as quick as a tyre change. I think at the moment, solid state batteries are the most promising contenders. They already offer higher energy density than Li-ion batteries.

Wouldn't bet on hydrogen fusion though. For the last 50 years it's had a habit of always being just around the corner. Even after we'll have the first reliable power station-sized fusion reactors, it'll probably take decades more before it can be shrunk down into a package that can be put inside a car like Back to the Future.

AI and machine learning have reached a critical mass now, where they've gone from fun novelty gadgets to uncomfortably impressive threats to society. The technology to well and truly fuck shit up already exists; someone just needs to have the idea that will do that. Like how smartphones were around for a while as just wanky phones, until apps started being actually useful. Or how nobody needed the Internet until people started putting good stuff on it. That's where we are with AI now.

>>456273
There was a massive breakthrough in fusion power recently, though. I would say cool fusion things will start appearing before cool graphene things start appearing. Graphene claims to be revolutionary, but I'm starting to suspect it might actually be useless.

>>456274
It's so fucking sad that all the years we've been fed sci-fi stories of evil AIs rising up and overthrowing us, when the reality of AI is that we're all just going to be driven to suicide thanks to Chinese and Indians using AI bots to completely swamp all media in an attempt to get ad revenue or run scams.

>>456274

The problem is always keeping up the initial reaction so that it becomes self sustaining.

A bit like a jet engine, although not entirely, a fusion reaction will perpetuate itself as long as there is fusion fuel and as long as you keep your fuel hot and dense enough for hydrogen atoms to keep smashing into each other. Case in point, the Sun. The energy created by the fusion inside a reactor can then be used to power the insanely strong magnetic field that toric designs like the Tokamak use to contain the fusion plasma. Which is also one reason why fusion is much safer for the environment than fission, because if there is a problem with the reactor, the magnetic field will simply cut out and the fusion process stops. And even if radioactive tritium escapes into the environment, it has a half life of 12 years, compared to hundreds of thousands of years for some of the heavy elements used and created by nuclear fission.

So far, they're still only managing to keep the fusion reaction up for fractions of a second, so that fusion reactors are really just a proof of concept. But again, once you really get it going, as my physics teacher once said, you will be able to power an entire house for a year with the deuterium atoms contained in one glass of water.

>>456273
I doubt there's ever going to be cause for fusion reactors at the scale of cars, because - as you say - storage is every bit as important as generating energy.

>>456274
>>456277
The press release for that major step forward in fusion, in which they managed to yield more energy than they put in, btw:
https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-fusion-ignition
Big fucking lasers.

Algae farms -> diesel/JP4 equivalents, is my best guess for the next really big disruptor, if we accept that AI and ML are here and inevitable. Cover as much of North Africa / Southern Europe as needed. Algal oils give you storage that solar and wind can only dream of, pipelines instead of intercontinental HVDC transmission, and slot into existing uses without scrapping every truck and plane.
Electrification is coming, but this would give the 15-20 years we need.

On a smaller scale, die stacking and maybe multi-level storage, like NAND has gained, but for DRAM. It's insane how much of a modern server's volume is filled with memory.

On an almost trivial level, fruit and veg picking robots handling individual items, rather than large scale machines working across exquisitely organised beds and rows of trees /plants.

Fucked if I know, though. Obviously.
It'll probably be arse-wiping robots.

>>456278

>I doubt there's ever going to be cause for fusion reactors at the scale of cars, because - as you say - storage is every bit as important as generating energy.

Although with a car sized fusion reactor, you wouldn't need to store much energy, and could create all the energy that isn't needed to set off the initial fusion reaction while the reactor is running.

You're probably right though that it'll be more practical to develop high-density batteries. Not least because you probably won't want to be caught in a car accident with a fusion reactor on wheels.

There's probably still a future for a small-sized reactor, e.g. in remote areas that will always be more or less off the main grid, like they do now with villages in rural Africa, where they put solar panels on people's roofs that charge what is essentially a large car battery.

AI, 100%. Large language models have achieved human-level performance at writing bullshit. Degree coursework, management reports, marketing blurb, customer service e-mails, you name it - an LLM like GPT or BLOOM will knock it out with ease and you'd never be able to pick it out as being written by an AI. LLMs aren't (yet) suitable for some applications because they tend to just blag it if they aren't sure, but that's an asset as often as it's a fault.

Given the number of people in this country whose jobs boil down to typing bollocks into a computer, AI will have a far more disruptive effect on our daily lives than any other technology over the next decade or so. I have to emphasise that this isn't like self-driving cars, it isn't a "this might be ready in five years if we can solve x, y and z" situation. Large language models are ready for commercial use and people are building businesses based on them as we speak.

>>456281

As the resident classlad, I keep trying to tell this to white collar office plankton who think they're safe from the rising tide of automation and globalisation. They tut about working class people who go racist because of all the Poles and what have you tekkin us jobs, but they haven't seen the writing on the wall.

At least working class people will still have jobs- Shite jobs paid horribly in terrible conditions, running around an Amazon warehouse like a blue arsed fly, pissing in bottles and passing out from dehydration, but jobs nevertheless. But people who do nothing all day but collating TPS reports and facing the Jenkins account to the underwriting team will simply be made obsolete, completely and utterly redundant.

We stand at a historical fork in the road between dystopia and utopia, and it all depends on how we manage AI and automation.

A plague that actually works this time.

>>456287

Covid 19 was just a practice run. I'm sure the scientists in that secret Chinese lab have taken its lessons to heart and are working tirelessly on a new strain that will get the job done for real next time.

There are very likely loads of people out there who actually believe that.

>>456288
>the scientists in that secret Chinese lab

Sounds like it's Pfizer though.

>>456281
Middle-class career academics on suicide watch at long last.

>>456290
What? How? Why?

>>456271
Further melding of man and machine.
Cyberpunk universe stuff.

>>456291

A lot of academic guff nowadays is already gibberish that sounds like it was written by GPT3. They won't be able to compete.

>>456294
Lorem ipsum generators didn't put Greek translators out of business I think they'll cope.