It's pretty easy to edit a genome, just shoot some radiation at it. It's a lot harder to do it precisely, and though CRISPR is a huge step in that direction, it's not likely that in 10 years you'll be able to walk into a doctor's office and they'll CRISPR that nagging genetic imperfection out of you.
CRISPR is a DNA nuclease, it cuts both strands of DNA at a site that is very precisely (though not perfectly) governed by an RNA template. If you cut both strands of a living thing's DNA, that's a Very Bad Thing for that organism. In fact, that's why it evolved, as a tool for bacteria to combat viruses.
CRISPR based tools depend on reassembling that DNA properly, ideally with the desired alteration (inserting or deleting other pieces of DNA at the cut site). This works well if you have the opportunity to try a whole bunch of cells, and then can figure out which ones have the desired DNA modification.
In an R&D context, that's an easy bar to clear, but in the clinic that means you're somewhat limited to things you can take out of the person, modify, multiply, and put back in the person. Often that means blood cells right now, but could eventually be adult stem cells. A huge advance to be sure, but many many diseases can't be addressed this way.
[1] https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...
Sure, it could lead to America (and the world as a whole) turning into a dismal hellhole of widening economic disparity between the haves and the have-nots. However, given the fact that humans are terrible at predicting so much as the weather in ten days, I can't help but retain a sense of optimism just out of lack of a productive alternative in mindset.
Furthermore, I can't see how value of car (regardless of who owns it) isn't in some way directly proportional to its utilization percentage. And a more heavily utilized car (because it's auto-navigating and picking up multiple passengers all day) is worth more. And a car that's worth more is a more financially feasible platform to install more expensive technology on.
Higher car utilization through shared ownership is going to alter a lot of the economics around what tech we can afford to put into vehicles.
We may not make huge leaps in anything but I don't think making things run smarter and more efficiently should be scoffed at.
From my background as a materials engineer I'm optimistic about finding applications for Graphene and advances in high temperature superconductors. I think both have the potential to be game-changers.
You missed the core of my point in your haste to nitpick: "not a consumer product". As in, regular folks aren't buying it anymore.
> And isn't a self driving car essentially the same thing as a taxi?
Yes, minus one employed person driving the car.
You have to combine that with flexible work hours (honestly, no reason this isn't already a thing), carpooling, or hybrid transport with car+rail/bus to have any impact on car ownership.
I suspect that the need to sync up with kiddie prison (aka school) is what locks everything into 9-to-5.
Unless you can get back to a majority of households having only one working adult, I don't think this is going to change any time soon.
I think a lot of processes could be migrated to asynchronous B2B communication without an overall impact on efficiency. Indeed, probably some gains from batching similar parcels of work together as opposed to a day of "What about X1?" "What about Y1?" "What about X2?" etc etc.
Wake up, do your morning routine, walk out the door, and there's a car waiting to chauffeur you to the subway station (or long-distance bus service)... preset with your favorite seat position, climate, and music.
Flex hours would help drive down costs by reducing idle capacity between 9 and 5 though.
> carpooling Self-driving vanpools with just-in-time routing FTW.
Gas cars will be playthings within 20 years.