Existing Absurd Technologies

Smartphones.

If you told someone in 1980 that just three decades later they will have a portable phone, a video phone, a worldwide electronic teletype, a movie player with a 300dpi screen, a color photo and video camera with a flash, a satellite world map, a music player that holds over a hundred LP albums, dictionaries and translation tools for all Earth languages, train and flight schedules updated in real time, a library of books (one of which an illustrated encyclopaedia that exceeds Britannica in volume and, in some areas, in accuracy), plus thousands of free porn channels and video games, all crammed into a single wireless device that fits in your pocket and costs less than $300 -- would they believe you?

I'm no expert on science fiction, but as far as I can tell, the vast majority of sci-fi authors missed this idea -- perhaps because it's too ridiculous to be believable.

Added: What's even more ridiculous for a layman from 30 years ago is that all this amazing stuff is implemented on the basis of a computer, basically a machine that adds or subtracts binary numbers and stores the results in memory. "Eh? A music player that works by adding binary numbers? Are you okay?"

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester isn't involved in any existing technology as far as I know, but it has apparently been verified in a lab and violates intuitions on how the world is supposed to work at the level of basic logic. ("Stuff that didn't happen can't matter.")

Radio transmission and nuclear energy would be my first ideas for technologies which almost no-one would assume can exist without a modern physics education or an existing proof of concept. It's hard to come up with earlier stuff than that. Hot-air balloons were probably very surprising, but the principle isn't that hard to grasp in retrospect. Electricity falls outside naive physics, but you can still observe lightning in nature. Nukes and radio on the other hand just plain shouldn't exist if you asked anyone well-educated and level-headed circa 1800.

Google actually mostly working. Wikipedia actually mostly working.

Cells (or if you like commentary, here).

Spray on skin.

Coffee ground hand.

I like to use milk as an example. We have industrial processes for squeezing a cow's udders so that it lactates, collecting the milk, pasteurizing and homogenizing it, and shipping it around the world. If you let milk rot and then treat it properly, you get cheese.

A few not too too weird things, that some people seem to appreciate.

Brain controlled catgirl ears.

There are so many robotic exoskeletons. The limiting factor on how many links was how long I felt like finding videos.

Birth control pills. You mean a few mg of chemicals put through the digestive tract can stop pregnancy?

Are we talking about non-rationalists, or non-x-rationalists? With Traditional rationalists (free thinkers, skeptics and the like), it seems that you could indeed phrase both of those issues are purely engineering problems with the strategy you are proposing, and expect some payoff.

With non-rationalists, however, it seems like the biggest part of the problems are these:

With strong AI, it is overcoming the tendency that people have to associate it with some foggy ideas about 'consciousness' they have cached, and thus conclude that it is 'beyond' the category of 'mere engineering problem'.

With cryonics, a somewhat related issue occurs with the association of death with a 'soul' or an 'afterlife' and cryonics. When you get into the specifics of reviving the brain, similar issues about 'consciousness' can arise as well.

That said, I might bring up the notion of printable organs.

The Apollo program. There's no particularly strange technology involved, but you're just not supposed to actually succeed in doing something like that.

Pretty much anything can sound weird if you phrase it the right way--check out Eliezer's post Mundane Magic.

A list I made a few years ago:

This morning I harnessed the power of lightning to make breakfast, made some synthetic milk for my baby daughter, watched some moving pictures that were sent over the ether, and then piloted my metal horseless carriage to work. I had some productive discussions about how to improve the ways in which we send people to space and back. (Although making predictions by using machines to solve trillions of nonlinear equations is very cheap, the results need to be more reliable.) Once I finish sending my musings to you folks via this world-girdling network of glass and copper wires, I plan to drive home at a hundred kilometers per hour over a few concrete ribbons (often suspended dozens of feet off the ground), instantly reheat some food with microwave radiation, and maybe enjoy a glass of grape juice that's been partially consumed and replaced by yeast excretions.

Some of these ideas are better or worse than others, they're all relatively normal today, and some of them have been pretty normal for decades or even millennia. But could you imagine what a crackpot you would sound like explaining each concept for the first time to someone unfamiliar with it?

Growing a replacement jawbone from stem cells in your abdomen.

You bring up cryonics and AI. 25 years ago Engines of Creation had a chapter on each, plus another on... a global hypertext publishing network like the Web. The latter seemed less absurd back then than the first two, but it was still pretty far out there:

One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. We provided lots of explanation. We had pictures. We had scenarios, little stories that told what it would be like. People would ask astonishing questions, like “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?” Alas, many things really must be experienced to be understood.

I believed Drexler's prediction that this technology would be developed by the mid-90s but I didn't expect it to be taking over the world by then. Probably to most people even in computers it was science fiction.

As far as computers in general, their hardware reliability's the least intuitive aspect to me. Billions of operations per second, OK, but all in sequence, each depending on the last, without a single error? While I know how that's possible, it's still kind of shocking.

I'm not sure if you mean technologies we use in every day life or just technology in general? If it's the latter then I think this video should astound.

1. The whole idea of public key cryptography. Take a message, put it through a certain algorithm, but the algorithm doesn't work in reverse.

2. Rockets in space. A flying vehicle that seems to move forwards by pushing on nothing.

3. The absolute speed limit of special relativity. Not quite technology, but the experiments could be described.

Writing a computer program that can defeat the strongest human chess player.

Google driverless car is one thing that comes to my mind that sounds like sci-fi idea but actually got implemented. It's still fresh so it makes big impression (at least among my friends). Check out the ted talk

We can bring the (recent) dead back to life.

Modern cryptography that everyone pretty much agrees can't be undone just by "breaking the code". Public-key encryption that enables reasonably secure internet commerce for regular people.

GPS, cellphones, Google, GoogleMaps, many an Internet service. Skype lets you call abroad for free! Vaccinations are a bit more iffy.

Mechanical ventilation is at least as miraculous as cryonics will turn out to be if it works. Victims of previously fatal diseases are saved by the stupid and brilliant trick of just keeping them breathing until they get better.

I think loudspeakers are pretty impressive. Who'd have thought that waving a paper cone around in just the right way could produce the same effect as blowing a French horn?

(Or just show them magnets - how do they work?)

In terms of visual and emotional impact I think the Luke arm is worth a mention.