[Iv]

> What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead?

I want a roboticized home that cleans itself, that is able to do autorepairs, rooms reconfiguration. I want an auto-laundry and an auto-kitchen. I want it smart enough to manage air flow, temperature and humidity efficiently. I want all that to be voice activated. Please make it offline to not depend on some cloud thingies.

I want a powerwall and solar panels, I want an automated herbs garden. I want things to be upgradable and fixable without destroying walls.

If you give me room on the exhibit, I'll throw in an automated greenhouse to produce a lot of the food and maybe an automated workshop that would be able to produce/repair small items.

That's doable, that's not here yet, but we have most of the tech.

The next frontier is not space, it is automation. I would go to a World's Fair that showed a future where we would have less work to do.

[asiachick]

Only 1/2 joking but there was an automation exhibit at the 64 world's fair. It was by Disney and then moved to Disneyland for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney%27s_Carousel_of_Pr...

It showed the progress of the kitchen over the years and ended with a push button kitchen like The Jetsons

I agree with you though. I want all of the things you listed. In particular, I want something that can dust (clean all the dust from my shelves, tables, books, etc..). I wonder if it could be done with small drones that can fly into the shelves with tiny dusters.

I want my walls and ceiling to be displays like from Total Recall for cheap (say under $500 per wall)

I want sound proofing between apartments, also cheap so there's no excuse for an apartment not to have it.

[Iv]

> I want my walls and ceiling to be displays like from Total Recall for cheap (say under $500 per wall)

Fun remark I heard in a startup's pitch: "If you have a hole in your wall, it is cheaper to buy a TV to hide it than to order a repair".

[dublin]

In college, two of my roommates were tussling and knocked a hole low in the wall between the kitchen bar and the hallway. As the only one with much craftsmanship ability, I took the roomie who was to pay for it down to the home center to buy drywall, tape, mud, and paint to fix the hole. Going to check out, we passed the air intake grills and the light bulb went on - we swapped the repair stuff for a grill and filter, went home to hack out a rectangular hole, and installed a new bogus air intake in the wall in just a few minutes. (The real intake was in the hall ceiling a few feet away, so it wasn't noticeable.)

Way quicker, cheaper, and easier than actually patching the wall and trying to match paint, and it got our deposit back, which was important since we were all broke seniors with no money coming in until we started our jobs. I've often wondered if anyone ever changed that filter! (My wife won't go for this method, so I've gotten pretty decent at matching drywall texture since then...)

[zdragnar]

I believe that is the basic setup to a few horror movies and episodes in TV shows.

Even so, I'm in, if it comes with an option to not be voice activated. Nothing about modern computing is more frustrating than voice interfaces, except perhaps windows updates.

[Iv]

Any evolution can be used as an horror movie device. Freeways, ubiquitous televisions, in a world that did not have that, you could make scary fictions about it.

I find it sad that nowadays dystopias have become the only depictions of futures.

[wffurr]

May I introduce you to the "hopepunk" genre? https://www.google.com/search?q=hopepunk&oq=hopepunk&aqs=chr...

Kim Robinson's Mars series stands out as a seminal example. Also one of his Three Californias triptych is a classic hopepunk story.

Looking over https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/hopepunk there's a lot I'm not familiar with, but can attest to the fundamentally optimistic takes in Andy Weir's The Martian and Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries.

[dublin]

Have a watch at the classic "The Glass-Bottom Boat" from 1966 - it has a decent view of what they expected would be near-future automation, much of which we're just now seeing as cost-effective.

[Cthulhu_]

That sounds like a lot of technology for something you could hire someone to do for you at a fraction of the cost. The main downside of that is that you'd have to deal with a person.

[yencabulator]

In pre-COVID times we used a cleaning service. I would much rather have a house that stays clean than one that needs cleaning. You're not setting your sights high enough.

[ramphastidae]

That’s not how automation works.

[Ericson2314]

Actually it is. 40-50 years ago we hit a point where growth stopped absorbing productivity gains. So all future automation also contributes to under employment, lowering the price of labor, reducing the need for further automation.

To try to bring back growth to pre 1970 leavels alone would cause horrific environmental destruction we cannot afford. In addition to taxing the environmental externalities, we also need to shrink the workweek and disburse UBI to the point where labor is in demand again. Only then will future automation work the way we want it to, and the way it did in the past.