Atomic "Bomb" Ring from KiX, 1947 (2020)
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As noted in another comment, I wouldn't consider Polonium to be "harmless."
But I grew up in an environment that would cause most parents, today, to defecate masonry. I grew up in Africa, and we had some really fun critters going through our backyard, like Black Mambas, Gaboon Vipers, and even the damn bugs were nasty. Bug bites could hurt for a month.
I somehow survived.
Citation needed. Radium paint was hazardous to workers making the watches, but alpha particles aren't getting through the crystal or movement and there's not a huge risk to wearing them.
Also, back then, they had radium philters (tonics).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_radioluminescence#Smal...
But it was just "minute traces."
It was also commonly in record and camera cleaning brushes, as it could be used to induce a static charge, which would attract dust. Likewise, encapsulated, so the risk with normal use was minimal, but again, if you ground the brush to dust and ate it, all bets are off.
Never had kids, huh?
What changed was that the wall of secrecy broke down and stories of pollution, corruption, and all around bad behavior hit the public like a tsunami. Then we learned that governments had been lying to us over things like Vietnam, with the Pentagon Papers, Watergate etc. Pretty hard to be positive after that. The computerization of the 1970s through 1990s was broadly positively perceived until the 2000s when it became undeniable that Big Tech would do anything to harvest users. Cambridge Analytica. Cutting off Netscape's air supply. Embrace, extend, and extinguish. There are not many reasons to be optimistic.
Nothing you listed actually helps most people.
AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.
Self Driving Car*. Waymo, everything else is trash. Mostly putting a human out of a job.
Access to space? Great for academics and strategic defense. Maybe the common man will get some transport benefit out of it? Not yet.
Autonomous drones? So we can kill each other better. Oh and the drone shows, definitely worth it.
Flying cars? Ha. Hahaha. Ok. A trained pilot got crashed into while landing at an airport, this year. It’s not going to be a thing without being fully autonomous. But killing people probably makes more money.
Yes autonomy is how modern flying cars are expected to be controlled. That's one of the enabling technologies, that you could imagine (if you're excited about the future) leads to a Jetsons style streams of cars in the sky where it's too complex for humans to pilot them directly.
> AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.
You could also call it another way for untalented people to provide value to society. You want to gatekeep productive work to some elites who "deserve" to profit from it even if that means limiting the amount of good it can do to everyone. You want to stop the world getting better? Why? To protect "talented" people's rent-seeking?
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Each year for the past few decades during the Southern Hemisphere spring, chemical reactions involving chlorine and bromine cause ozone in the southern polar region to be destroyed rapidly and severely. This depleted region is known as the “ozone hole”
Now you're praising technologies that won't help the poor or make most people's lives more meaningful because they will be monetized to the point of uselessness. Sheesh!
If they become useless, they won't have a place in the market anymore. Do you really believe self-driving cars will never be useful because the companies controlling them will try to extract too much profit?