The State of Technology - 0 BL

Passenger Vehicles

• Exclusively fully self driving electric vehicles. Manual driving is exclusively for motorsport.
• Autonomous electric air "taxis" are fairly common and available through the ride hailing apps.
• Privately owned vehicles often offer ranges of over 2000km, while local transit fleets use much smaller batteries with ranges of 500km.
• There have been no vehicle collisions in 10 years
• Vehicle interiors have come to resemble lounges, theaters, offices, and anything else you can imagine. No longer constrained by needing a forward facing, attentive drive, nor by the need for safety restraints, other things can be prioritized, such as creature comforts, functionality, and aesthetics.
• Autonomous Electric RVs are an increasingly popular vacation option in large countries.
• All kinds of personal vehicles that were once internal combustion are now battery-electric vehicles: boats, atvs, snowmobiles, motorcycles, jetskis, etc

Mass Transport

• Hyperloops have replaced rail for long distance freight and passenger transport in most countries around the world. Notably not in the united states, where public transportation was never considered a priority.
• For local transportation, there are self-driving electric buses, electric light rail, and autonomous ride-hailing services.
• The wealthy fly hypersonic private electric jets, while the masses rely on an aging fleet of carbon-burning jets, with some newer supersonic jets for aspirational professionals who could never afford their own plane.
• 50% of the world's cargo ships are electric, the remaining are diesel. All new ships being manufactured are electric.
• Ferries and tug boats are nearly all electric

Computers

• Smartphone form factor has been retired in favor of augmented reality lenses, available as glasses with your choice of frame, or contact lenses. Apple and Microsoft make the two main OSes. Despite fitting within standard fashionable frames, smartglasses offer many thousands of times the processing power of todays fastest gaming computers. The contact lenses are driven wirelessly by an auxiliary computation unit integrated into a watch or piece of jewelry, and likewise offer thousands of times the processing power of today's most powerful systems. Regardless of the form factor, these devices allow photorealistic holograms to appear in the wearers view. They monitor gaze and brainwave activity for the primary interface, but also run the software for your personal virtual assistant. These virtual assistants are non-sentient, but capable of many advanced features, and speak in a convincingly human way. They can act on your behalf in many ways (making appointments, etc), as well as perform complex search and analysis tasks to answer conversational queries. They are powered by siphoning tiny amounts of heat from your body, but also have a battery capacity that allows them to last several days without touching you.

Power

• There are a handful of new fusion reactors online. The technology is very promising, and more construction projects are underway.
• No new coal power plants have been built in 20 years
• Rooftop solar is ubiquitous
• There are many large-scale wind farms, both on land, and off-shore
• Many places have been replaced heating oil with geothermal, and the rest rely on a combination of solar heat and electric heat.
• Most new windows produce electricity. Some have adjustable opacity, with darker windows generating more electricity
• Everything is generally much more energy efficient than we currently have

Agriculture

• Agriculture looks mostly the same (industrial monoculture), but more robots.
• Pesticides and herbicides have been replaced by targeted lasers
• Animal husbandry is down 90% since 2021 CE, with plant-based and cell-cultured products replacing them from fast food chicken nuggets to michelin rated filet minon
• Coffee, chocolate, vanilla, and other tropical staples have increased in price dramatically due to climate change

Medicine

• For-profit healthcare continues to be hamstrung by its many inherent flaws, but neverless continues delivering a steady 0.2yrs/yr of live expectancy gain, meaning life expectancy at this point is 87.8 years.
• The extremely wealthy have stopped visibly aging, and in many cases appear to be getting slowly younger. It is unclear if they have managed to synthesize the benefits of Youth Parabiosis, or are simply hoarding blood plasma from young "donors". Though Jeff Bezos is 81 years old, he looks younger than he did at 50.
• Commercially available robotic prosthetics have gotten very good, for those who can afford them. Many offer better-than-baseline functionality, such as running extreme speeds, incredible feats of dexterity, or jumping great distances.
• There has been a big movement in open-source 3d printable prosthetics, offering comparable features to commercially available products at a fraction of the cost. A leg still costs $3-4k to buy and print all the parts for, but that is less than 1% of what the leading commercial brand costs, so it's a popular option for many.
• Prosethic eyes, ear drums, tongues, etc are all commercially available, but their reliance on direct neural attachments has restricted their installation to licensed hospitals. Accordingly, it has not seen a strong precense in the open-source community.
• Vaccine efficacy has continued to rise, with very effective vaccines now commonly available for many infectious diseases, includes HIV, HSV, Malaria, and many rhinovirus variants. However, the disease of ignorance has stayed strong and vaccine denialism remains very prominant. As a consequence, around 70% of people are living considerably longer than life expectancy, with ages over 100 being increasingly common. The other 30% tend to die much younger than life expectancy, often of easily preventable causes.
• There has been a lot of success culturing organs for transplant from the recipient's own cells. This is a time consuming and expensive process, however, so even if you can afford it, you may wait 18 months or more for your replacement organ to grow. The wealthy have started pre-emptively growing replacement organs for themselves to that they can be available on a moment's notice. Some aging billionaires are rumored to have had nearly all of their organs replaced, some more than once.
• Cancer fatality rates have been falling quickly for over a decade as the benefits of environmental reforms are starting to be felt, in combination with advances in treatments.