Lasers fucking suck.
I mean, I truly do believe that. No, that's not commentary on their utility, or their design, or their history, it's just the simple, plain observable facts: They suck.
They're simply nothing like what you'd think they're like.
I grew up in the 2000s, and had a lot of exposure to contemporary kids' television programming. This meant cartoons, mostly - I could never click with the live action kids shows like iCarly and Victorious. I liked superhero stuff, I liked spy stuff, those sorts of things. Totally Spies, Kim Possible, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, and then later things like Steven Universe, She-Ra, Phineas and Ferb and its contemporaries. All of those shows led me to believe one thing: Lasers are dangerous, lasers are the solution to many problems, and lasers are fuckin sick.
No greater disappointment ever befell me than that of turning on a laser rangefinder for the first time, expecting a beam of red light to shoot out of it like an infinite lightsaber. It didn't. It made a dot on the wall, which the device felt the need to inform me was 285 centimetres away.
No special forces operatives would ever carry the laser lipstick from Totally Spies, or a militarised alternative. It's simply not practical. You won't cut through inches thick steel vault doors in this universe.
Laser hair removal is a similar can of worms, and lasers are also involved here. It sounds perfect, futuristic, just zap it all away. No, it takes time, multiple sessions, is expensive as hell and doesn't even work on all types of hair.
And don't even get me started on Laser Tag. The biggest bullshit there is. The vests are heavy, bulky, the guns are never fun to use, and since they're hitscan weapons, if you get hit it's usually just because you didn't see someone sneaking up behind you. No projectiles of light, no dodging shots.
This is a concept I call The Usual Way. Nearly every story, even non-fiction ones, are amplified in some way if the writer at all cares about creating compelling media. Of course, scientific writing is usually exempt from this, but exceptions prove the rule here.
I'll hammer the point home some more. Finally, our Back to the Future future is here. We have hoverboards! But they have wheels, and you look like an absolute ponce using them.
The promise of artificial intelligence is realised! But, oh, the big models are controlled by huge corporations, aren't actually that good at doing the thing the Star Trek computer did effortlessly, and have numerous dreadful implications for both privacy and copyright.
And the Metaverse. It's the next big thing, they said. The future of social interaction, they said. A digital frontier where you can be anyone, do anything, experience everything, as long as that everything is a clunky, laggy, half-baked tech demo where you waddle around as a legless avatar in a corporate-branded wasteland. The graphics look like they were ripped from a PlayStation 2 game, and the "experiences" are about as engaging as watching paint dry, and the god damn controls are even worse.
I struggle to come up with any one universal concept that is exactly as cool as the movies and books made it out to be. Flying cars are stupid and expensive, if they even work at all, electric ones aren't much better since they don't fix inner city gridlock either, and if there is the once-in-a-lifetime technology that actually IS as good as everyone says, like heat pump based heating for example, the right wing will be at your throat for daring to implement something that will make the world on average a tiny bit better.
Things suck in the worst possible way: The usual way.