First TL-9 items

[Opellulo]

Originally Posted by Inky

I'm not sure that the ethics problems with the self-driving cars (though there may be other problems) and the lack of large-scale uses for virtual or augmented reality really stop them from counting. If the TL9 technology is there, it doesn't make it any less TL9 that nobody wants it.

Back ON Topic:
The original post was inquiring about "futurist techs" that would be market available between now and 2025. Yes, the techs you mentioned exists in some form of another but they are not available to general public (and IMHO they will remain as such for a long time) because their deploy on a wider audience would surface a lot of problems that nobody (and especially the companies developing them) want to consider or worse, be held accountable.

The adoption of self driving cars is a prime example and, given the current trends, the parallel with cryptocurrencies is quite fitting. Huge geographical and social differences in a tech that have a clean split between a small "premier user" base reaping the benefits and the larger public paying the consequences.

Back on the slightly off topic "The TL we live in"
IMHO is the existence of such techs in the "everyday space" of the average human what defines where the "current TL" is.
- Is your laptop powered by fusion power? No and it will not be for long time.
- Can you use augmented reality googles? No because nobody sells it (right now the best you can have is a stylish dumber version for perverts).
- Can you own a self driving car? Only under very specific conditions that apply to like 2% of the global population and, even so, you are a paying beta tester for a toy that could not even become "a thing".
- Can you have a mRNA vaccine? Hell, you already have it in you blood (same as other 3 billion people unless you are somebody's crazy uncle) so yes, to me this registers as a technology in the "everyday space" of someone living in the late 2021 (well at least if we are talking about someone living the RICH part of the World).
Would it have been the same without Covid? I Don't think so, probably it would have remained a fringe tech for at least another 10 years.

All this to say that IMHO there a distorted perception of the times we are living in: on one side you have people believing in the PR stunts of the dumbest rich person on twitter that sells those "the future is now" ideas as venture capital advertisement (while at the same time cashing in defense contract and carbon trade permits because public money is the only sure one) on the other you have the hard reality that the only large scale adoption of a futurist technology was because of a world wide pandemic, never seen before public investments and a couple of medical suggested regulations that were welcomed by some as literally the Holocaust. So yeah, cool off your expectation for battlesuits or Terraforming Mars.

And back on the wildly OFF TOPIC
The underlying technology in Cryptocurrency is blockchain, which by itself is only a simple append-only, openly shared, cryptographic validated (and for all those reasons EXTREMELY inefficient) database.

Its main difference with a modern FIAT currency is that while currency is backed and regulated by the country that emits it (and for this reason it is linked to a crazy amount of different factors, from GDP to political stability) Cryptocurrency is backed by bunch of anonymous randos on the internet and regulated by few opaque agents... That claims there is no regulation at all because they are living the capitalist dream of having all the profits without being held accountable for any responsibility.

As a matter of fact blockchain found very few applications outside cryptocurrencies: there were attempts of using it as a smart contract system for distribution chains (I may have first hand experience of a similar project by IBM ans MAERSK in 2018) and there were even attempts to sell it as a way to certify electronic voting. But, as said above, it's a very inefficient and expensive tech to do stuff that is already managed in simpler and cheaper ways.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Farmer

All currency is valuable only to the extent that people believe in and accept the value. Money is a medium of exchange. Sure, you might put some precious metals or whatever in it, but once it's currency rather than a weight of metal (or other items), it's all about belief and acceptance (which flow from other things like scarcity).

Nothing special about precious metals, either. Gold's value is primarily based on the fact that you can reliably find someone else who considers gold valuable.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

They are worth something because people believe they are and are willing to buy them. If people stopped believing in digital currencies tomorrow they'd crash. Airplanes don't crash if people stop believing in them.

Those are two very different meanings for the word "crash." In fact, if everyone stopped believing in airplanes tomorrow, they'd see the same sort of "crash" as disbelieved cryptocurrency would - they'd be seen as useless, and no longer utilized, and thus worth nearly nothing (well, the airplanes could be harvested for parts and scrap, while with cryptocurrency you'd only be able to delete it to free up some storage). I'm honestly not certain if airplanes or cryptocurrency require more "buy in" to be usable. Airplanes require far more dedicated infrastructure but have a good deal of objective utility, while the utility of, say, Bitcoin is entirely subjective but requires far less dedicated infrastructure.

Ultimately, I think cryptocurrency can count as an invention unless using a rather narrow definition of the word.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

The original post was inquiring about "futurist techs" that would be market available between now and 2025.

Rereading the original post, it looks like it was just asking which TL9 technology currently in development was likely to be available first; the 2025 date was simply a reference to when GURPS originally estimated TL9 would start. That said, expanding the conversation beyond that doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

Is your laptop powered by fusion power? No and it will not be for long time.

If you're talking directly powered (via some sort of microfusion cell), that seems unlikely to ever happen. Even if you're talking indirectly (that is, the electricity you got from the wall outlet to charge your laptop was produced by a nearby fusion reactor), that sort of requirement indicates we generally don't have fission either (nuclear only accounts for ~20% of energy generation in the United States, so chances are good the electricity you used to charge your laptop this morning didn't come from a fission reactor).

Originally Posted by Opellulo

Can you use augmented reality googles? No because nobody sells it (right now the best you can have is a stylish dumber version for perverts).

According to the store site, I can purchase a Microsoft Hololens 2 today and have it delivered as early as tomorrow. It's rather pricey ($3,500, plus taxes, shipping, and handling), but it's available. Perhaps it's not quite what you envision as AR (honestly, from what I've seen, it doesn't quite match what I think of, being more "VR where you can still see the real world"), but I think it still fits the definition of Augmented Reality. It's just arguably a late TL8 / early TL9 version rather than a properly mature TL9 one.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

Can you own a self driving car? Only under very specific conditions that apply to like 2% of the global population and, even so, you are a paying beta tester for a toy that could not even become "a thing".

While it's by no means guaranteed, it's entirely possible for self-driving vehicles to become a reality. It would require some legal and PR work, of course, to set the law (and convince the public) that either what is achievable is "good enough" (the Trolley Problem isn't a legal problem if the law dictates which solution is to be followed, or even if it says "given two (or more) equally bad options, choose randomly"), or that manual-operation vehicles should go extinct, at least on the designated "self-driving only" parts of the road system.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

Can you have a mRNA vaccine? Hell, you already have it in you blood (same as other 3 billion people unless you are somebody's crazy uncle) so yes, to me this registers as a technology in the "everyday space" of someone living in the late 2021 (well at least if we are talking about someone living the RICH part of the World).
Would it have been the same without Covid? I Don't think so, probably it would have remained a fringe tech for at least another 10 years.

I'm not certain it would have remained fringe for quite so long, given the potential applications, but certainly it wouldn't have become so generally available without the kick-in-the-rear of the pandemic.

Originally Posted by RyanW

Nothing special about precious metals, either. Gold's value is primarily based on the fact that you can reliably find someone else who considers gold valuable.

Many precious metals have been found to have more objective utility, like gold as a conductor with low reactivity, platinum as a catalyst, silver to kill vampires as an antimicrobial, etc.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Farmer

Their value is certain more tenuous than most soverign backed currencies but...probably better than a few (how many KPWs would you accept outside of North Korea, for example)?

No NK currency whatsoever. Not the least becase I probably couldn't trade it for anything else immediately. I do expect that sovereign currencies will have a certain "inertia" to them. Probably proportional to the likelihood of the issuing body popping like a soap bubble.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Those are two very different meanings for the word "crash." .

I'd say more like "parallel" rather than "very different". Both mean something like "come to a disasterous stop" but with airplanes the sudden stop comes from hitting something else existing in objective reality.

Objective reaiity makes believing "airplanes don't work any more" a delusion. They won't fall out of the sky because of those beliefs. "Cryptocurrencies aren't really worth anything" is just a difference of opinon but it happens in a realm where belief is everything.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I'd say more like "parallel" rather than "very different". Both mean something like "come to a disasterous stop" but with airplanes the sudden stop comes from hitting something else existing in objective reality.

I suppose that's fair, but airplanes falling out of the sky because nobody believes they can fly is comparable to every Bitcoin becoming irreversibly corrupted because nobody believes they are money. Outside of magic, disbelief isn't goin to cause either of those things. Universal disbelief would put a stop to Bitcoins and make them no longer worth anything... but largely the same would be true of airplanes, as if nobody believes they work, nobody's going to use them (or support them, so the existing infrastructure will either be repurposed or deserted).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I suppose that's fair, but airplanes falling out of the sky because nobody believes they can fly is comparable to every Bitcoin becoming irreversibly corrupted because nobody believes they are money. ).

Who said anything about "irreversibly corrupted"? Their blockchains (or whatever) could still be pristine but I'd only barely consider accepting payment in them now because I think/hope they could be rapidly turned into something more durable. If I can't find somebody to do that trade with me the state of the blockchains is irrelevant.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

No NK currency whatsoever. Not the least becase I probably couldn't trade it for anything else immediately. I do expect that sovereign currencies will have a certain "inertia" to them. Probably proportional to the likelihood of the issuing body popping like a soap bubble.

Yep, that's exactly it. As a medium of exchange, it only holds value if someone is prepared to exchange something for it.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Nothing special about precious metals, either. Gold's value is primarily based on the fact that you can reliably find someone else who considers gold valuable.

Well, yes. That's what makes it precious - demand versus supply. The drivers of that demand, and the likely consistency of its scarcity, help you to determine how likely it is to hold its value.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Who said anything about "irreversibly corrupted"? Their blockchains (or whatever) could still be pristine but I'd only barely consider accepting payment in them now because I think/hope they could be rapidly turned into something more durable. If I can't find somebody to do that trade with me the state of the blockchains is irrelevant.

You were comparing a collapse of cryptocurrency due to people losing faith in it to the idea of airplanes falling from the sky and crashing due to the same. I was pointing out that isn't an appropriate comparison - the equivalent of airplanes falling from the sky due to literally no longer working would be cryptocurrency literally no longer working (such as if the data were irreversibly corrupted). Similarly, the equivalent of cryptocurrency no longer having any worth because people completely lost faith in it would be people completely losing faith in airplanes... in which case the airplanes would also have no worth, because while they are still physically capable of flight, nobody is willing to have them do so.

That said, I'm largely in the same boat as you are with regards to it, which is why none of my money is invested in it.