Flying Cars
I know many, many people want flying cars to be a real thing. But, what is always going to prevent us from having true flying cars is, look at how people normally are with the cars on the ground. Drunk driving is tenfold going to be worse with flying cars, people are going to totally fly their vehicles into buildings, for sure. I think the closest we’re going to get to flying cars, is the hover cars we see in Back to the Future II that are more ground level, but hover. Even then, I don’t know if we’re ever going to be ready for them.
True AI
What I mean with True AI is an AI that can actually be a little more sentient and living than what we got now. When AI first rolled out, it really put a damper on everyone in so many ways that I don’t think we’re ever going to see it. There’s just too much at stake to trust an AI with the capability to think on its own and do things on its own. We’re just going to be stuck with Semi-AI that only talk back to you in text form and maybe help you code. And that alone already has ruffled the feathers of millions who are hating AI which is another thing to consider.
We can do it to living people (Gene Therapy is just editing DNA using an inert virus to deliver the payload and modify gene expressions), and there is a very good chance CRISPR allows it for in utero cells.
If we had zero ethical boards, we’d be at the active experimentation stage to discover what each nucleotide pair precisely does which would involve growing humans directly.
That being said we are doing things that are close to it. For example look up the term organoid. Then Brain organoid. Then realize pretty much every university is growing unique but stunted human brains and experimenting on them; and then realize these organoids dream. Anyway that existential horror aside, this also extends to almost every organ in the human body. We’re essentially brute forcing gene expression discovery at the individual component level; if we were to scale that up to a full human (or get much, much faster computers so we could simulate it) we’d have the totality of DNA fully understood.
From there it’s trivial to combine our current tech that allows free form editing of DNA with exactly what we would need to change.