Are bodily pain and embarrassment really that important? I'm rather fond of romantic troubles, but that seems like the sort of thing that could be negotiated with the superhappies by comparing it to their empathic pain. It also seems like the sort of thing that could just be routed around, by removing our capacity to fall out of love and our preference for monogamy and heterosexuality.
Your science weirdtopia seems a lot like how MMORPGs work now, to a large degree. There's an internally consistent set of world-rules, but they won't tell you what they are. Sure, people are happy to share their experimental results with you, but you have to go looking. Spoilers aren't left out in the open.
Why would we need the weirdtopia science to be performed on the physical world? Wouldn't new world-rules, optimized for the fun of learning them be better?
I'd say most of those things have in fact come to pass. The ones that haven't are primarily non-technological matters of preference (ie, keyboards) or highly specialized/low profit market niches (services for the disabled, primary education).
Rotating memory is on the way out, we've all got (or can easily have) high resolution wireless telephony/internet, and printed newspapers and magazines are essentially dead.
He's also very right about the growing neo-luddite movement. Case in point the organic anti-GM lobby and the anti-nuclear coal fetishists.
I'd say most of those things have in fact come to pass. The ones that haven't are primarily non-technological matters of preference (ie, keyboards) or highly specialized/low profit market niches (services for the disabled, primary education).
Rotating memory is on the way out, we've all got (or can easily have) high resolution wireless telephony/internet, and printed newspapers and magazines are essentially dead.
He's also very right about the growing neo-luddite movement. Case in point the organic anti-GM lobby and the anti-nuclear coal fetishists.
They can't publish such a plan because it would depend almost entirely on who was in power. In the US specifically, also because no executive has any incentive to plan for anything at all beyond their 8th year.