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TEC349: Every sci-fi fan has had the same thought watching a movie or reading a novel: not “I want the lasers,” but “I want that” — the badge you tap to reach your ship, the machine that hands you whatever you order, the gadget that just works. So which of those promises has science actually kept, and which ones does the physics simply not allow?

Dom Bettinelli and Thomas Sanjurjo take the whole sci-fi technology wishlist and sort it into four honest buckets. First, the tech that’s already here: Jules Verne dreaming up working submarines and rockets, Arthur C. Clarke sketching communication satellites in the 1940s, and the Star Trek communicator that engineers say directly shaped the Motorola flip phone. Then the stuff that’s almost real today — flexible roll-out screens like the “globals” from Earth: Final Conflict, augmented-reality glasses with an AI agent riding along (straight out of Neuromancer), a Jarvis-style assistant you can actually talk to, the universal translator now living in your AirPods, seasonal thermal energy storage, and the medical tricorder that the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE turned from prop into prototype.

From there it gets harder. In maybe someday, they look at the transparent holographic displays from The Expanse, flying cars (where the real obstacle is safety and regulation, not engineering), fusion power, encrypted natural-language speech, and warp drive by way of the genuinely theoretical Alcubierre drive. And in keep dreaming, they make the case against stable wormholes, the Star Trek transporter — the “murder machine” and its unsettling questions about the soul — conscious androids, time travel, and faster-than-light communication.

The conversation keeps circling back to a deeper question: what would it even mean for a machine to be conscious? Dom walks through functionalism, biological naturalism, and integrated information theory, and lands on why he thinks Data will always be a toaster.

Then it’s on to the headline — Anthropic’s powerful “Mythos” model, the guardrailed “Fable” release, the government order to pull it, and what that means for the cybersecurity arms race — followed by the picks of the week: Webull and Whisper Memos.

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Links for this episode:

• Almost real today
• Earth: Final Conflict “Global”
• Jarvis (Iron Man)
• Medical tricorder (Tricorder X Prize)
• Neuromancer AR & AI agents (Purdue AgentAR)
• Sultana’s Dream solar/seasonal thermal storage
• Maybe someday
• The Expanse holographic displays
• Fusion power
• Warp drive (Alcubierre drive)
• Flying cars
• The Peripheral secure speech (IEEE)
• The Jaunt – Wikipedia
• Headlines
• Cybersecurity vets protest US ban on Anthropic models
• The Anthropic ban was never about an AI jailbreak

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Picks of the Week:

• Thomas: Webull
• Dom: Whisper Memos

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Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.