As 2025, the first year of this blog, winds down, an interesting exercise is to review our Future Bucket List to see what progress has, and hasn’t been made.
Part of that review exposed a glaring hole in the list we first enumerated in early 2022: there is no mention of A.I., which really took off with chatGPT later that year.
Other holes will no doubt be exposed in the Future. But, for the Present, as 2025 fades into the Past, here’s where the list is at:
- Will this list ever be imbedded in our brain. A long ways to go.
- Functional self driving cars. Alan got to ride in one!
- The disappearance of gas stations. Alan and Priscilla got their first EV. No more gas stations for us.
- Personal life recording system. Awaiting a Future blog post.
- Spell check that actually works. Knot moving foreword.
- Nuclear fusion. Progress. Might need it to power A.I.
- Quantum computing. Progress? Hard to determine.
- People on the moon, again. We should at least get around the moon and back “No Later than April 2026.” We’ll see.
- People on Mars. “SpaceX is planning to launch the first Starships to Mars in 2026.”
- Mission to near star. Fun to dream about.
- Pet cloning. Tom Brady did it. It’s here, but is there a market?
- AR glasses. Almost here? Demo didn’t go so good.
- Thought-controlled systems. Brain-computer interfaces making slow but steady progress.
- Restorative medical technology (restoring sight, movement, etc.). Slow but steady progress.
- Human cloning. Both science and society are a long way off.
- Germ-line genetic modification. Science and society closer.
- Neuron-by-neuron human brain mapping
- Brain backup. Long way to go.
- Holodeck. A.k.a. really good VR. Vision Pro heading that way.
- Online voting. Science about ready. Society not so much.
- Personal DNA analyzer
- Elimination of our dependence on fossil fuels. Still heading the wrong direction.
- Milestone that demonstrates that we solved global warming. Wishful thinking.
- Universal translator. New Apple AirPods are a start.
- All babies sequenced at birth. First studies under way.
- 8 billion people in one family tree, using genetics. Someday?
- Flying cars. Keep dreaming.
- Cryonics. A SciFi favorite.
2025 Scorecard: Missing 1. Progress 16. Not 11.
