Ask Lemmy

A pill or vaccine that will cure everything and enable you to live longer and healthier.

Legal easy access to high quality drugs. Too many people are unable to regulate their alcohol, let alone ket, mdma, speed, lsd, etc if it were sold under similar rules as booze.

Improved traffic infrastructure, particularly cycling. People would prefer to keep doing the wrong thing than change their habits.

Physics aside, flying cars would be doable if they would be self-driving.

Invisibility

my bad, it's not considered tech. Removed.

We don't have dumb AI because we are afraid to 'let them off the chain.' This is pretty much it for LLMs in terms of capability. 'Agentic' might get a little better at some point but it isn't going to be 'real AI' without years of user data, years of training, and as-of-yet non-existent technology.

As for your question... I deny the premise. There is nothing to stop anyone if it is possible to do a thing. Right now, for the cost of a car, if a person had the knowledge and will, they could buy a synth bio lab for their garage and build a pandemic. You, just like so many others, could build a truck bomb capable of destroying a building. People regularly design destructive computer software as a hobby. People, mostly but not only Americans, can acquire guns and shoot dozens of people before anyone can stop them. There is literally no direct way to prevent any of these things. The thing that keeps us from having massive attacks every day is simply not many people have the inclination.

If we found a way to make something like a truth serum, I can guarantee it'd be misused. I mean like a Divergent truth serum, which IIRC makes lying nearly impossible. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.

The elite would never take it and instead take a fake version that looks the exact same just so they can remain in control.

invisibility cloak or potions. They kinda already do with stealthy surveillance tech.

Not really the same thing but if people did not steal and could mind their own business and just generally work to be nice to each other and not cheat. Then we would save a lot of processing power and energy by not needing encryption and such. Out tech would have been able to advance that much more quickly. Securing software is a big junk of time in development.