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You know, we'd all be safe from the zombies if I HAD MY GODDAMN FLYING CAR ALREADY!

I mean, seriously, Jetsons was on, what, 40 years ago? What happened?

Unless, of course, the zombies can drive, in which case I'm sure we can all agree that we're fucked.

While I 100% agree with the need to protect sapient rights regardless of species or construction material you do have to approach this one slightly differently since the stakes are different.

If I was a silicon brain you could just back me up. As long as you disabled my pain processors you could do whatever you wanted to me. I would even be proud to be helping so many of my organic cousins at nothing but inconvenience. And since I'm a silicon brain with no where to go yet I wouldn't really have anything else to do except be retarded or schizophrenic from time to time.

Using orphans, prisoners the military and even middle and lower class children as unknowing guinea pigs was never a problem for many scientists and DRs until the '70s.

Sorry scratch that for many it still isn't [bbc.co.uk].

One thing to notice is that various government departments are up to their arms in it as well.

Some choice examples:

(1957) "In order to study how blood flows through children's brains, researchers at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child's femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek). "

(1962) New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine

(1962)
Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).

(1963)
Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation's effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).

(1967)

Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will

(1968)
Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans

(1990)
The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).

I wonder how many here will defend these scientists and their experiments?

It's very simple to see why this happens. When you start a project, or even just a stage of a project, you have some list of problems and you may even have some idea of the solutions. You can use good judgement to estimate the time it takes (at least to some order of magnitude), and rounding off to 10 years makes for good press.

But when you actually begin the work, every problem you solve illuminates a whole new set of problems to solve. If each solution opens up more than one new problem, you've "increased" the amount of work left to be done. So either you cut back on some of the goals (to reduce the list of problems) or you admit it wasn't as simple as you thought and announce a new project to tackle some subset of the new set of problems.

Translation: How long before no one will remember or care what sensationalist claim I made. Hopefully I'm outta here by then. I know. 10 years!

It's like the 100 and 1000 year longevity of CDs. Those companies are counting on the fact that they won't be around to sue!

I've been listening "in 10 years we'll have X awesome technology", but time come and go and nothing has changed, so, i'll be expecting this artificial brain so i could drive my flying car(you know, that 3D driving thingie) to arrive at the entrance of the spacial elevator so i could bang some lunar chicks.

Not everything predicted has come true, to be sure. But think about it: you are leaving a post on a computer located hundreds or thousands of miles away, along with hundreds of other people, and I, hundreds or thousands of miles away, am replying. Neither of us pays much at all for this service, which is nearly ubiquitous.

You can casually watch television shows on demand, on your phone. Which, BTW, is roughly analogous to the pocket communicators on the original series of "Star Trek", except that they couldn't watch shows or take video/pictures or blog or play solitaire on them.

There is sufficient storage in your computer to track every single man, woman, and child on earth, many times over. The price of photovoltaic solar cells has followed a consistent, exponential drop in price (half price every 5-ish years) and is now close to parity with coal.

Cars are many, many, many times safer than they used to be - most accidents now result in basically no significant injuries, even when the car is totalled, thanks to crumple zones. Flat panel TVs are commonplace, with resolutions that rival photographic paper. Flexbile, folding displays are available, if (still) expensive.

I'm not sure what kind of changes you would expect, but these are just a few of the awesome technologies that I've seen unfold in my 30-something years. I mean, what do you want?!?!

Spinal Tap would.