TL;DR for the main question: too unsafe, too expensive, not competitive enough (except over narrow intermediary distances) against ground cars and long-distance airplanes.
In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” When I first saw that quote, I chuckled, because for my entire life, we’ve had flying buses. And again and again, as I sit on a flying bus and marvel at the thrill of takeoff, and reflect on how amazing it is that man has conquered the air, I look around and see my fellow passengers with their window shades drawn, their noses buried in a book or staring at a phone.
"If we had flying cars, we’d enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we’d be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over."
Probably. Hedonic treadmill is a bitch. #946539 #929023
Book summary:
Where Is My Flying Car? occupies an interesting middle space between genres. Futurism is about predicting the future. Science fiction is about (among other things) speculating on possible futures. And history of technology explains the past. Where Is My Flying Car? has bits of all three of these, but fundamentally it’s a book of retrofuturism — it’s about the technologies we thought we would get but didn’t, and why we didn’t, and how we could get them now.
Hall argues that a combination of overregulation, scientific groupthink, bad funding mechanisms, and cultural aversion prevented us from achieving all four of these [cold fusion, nanotech, nuclear fission, flying cars].
He claims that cold fusion is a promising area of research, and that what he terms the “Machiavelli Effect” — basically, vested interests trying to shut down research that would supersede their own research programs — strangled the promising field of cold fusion in its cradle by stigmatizing it and depriving it of funding.
"That story just doesn’t pass the smell test."
Agreed. Too much conspiratorial nonsense down that route.
One of Hall’s main points in Where Is My Flying Car? — and the book’s best point, in my opinion — is that physical technology began to stagnate when energy use began to stagnate.
Then Noah goes wrong in conclusion:
In fact, the curve is too simplistic, but the basic point is solid. We failed to transition to energy sources better than fossil fuels. It’s a simple truth that if you want your economy to escape poverty, you need lots of energy consumption
That's not the takeaway in our overregulated, green/woke, climate change-obsessed times; we just didn't use enough of the excellent machine food we had at our disposal. ... and Noah gets at it a bit later:
Americans aren’t afraid of energy, they’re afraid of land use; the 70s saw the anti-growth movement impose restrictions not just on power plants, but on housing, factories, infrastructure, and every other kind of physical development.
This is the magic of dematerialization, and it’s the reason economic growth doesn’t inevitably exhaust the planet’s resources. Not only have humans in rich countries figured out how to produce the same physical stuff with far less energy use, but we’ve found lots of other stuff we like that isn’t physical. Around 1970, Americans started spending more on services than on goods
True enough.
His triumphant futures always revolve around the conquest of the physical — real spaceships, real weather control, real flying cars. And yet he never really explains why we should expend such massive amounts of energy and resources conquering the physical world — it’s simply presented as a triumphant, “Wouldn’t this be awesome?” kind of vision.
That was always the true, authentic, human drive: the tinkerer and insane dreamer trying to do impossible things because it seems cool. Or?
Also, I don't think this is a particularly informed or accurate rendition but what do I know?
Finally:
the biggest pitfall of engineerism: It focuses too much on supply and not enough on demand. To many engineers, the most important question is “Can we build this?”, not “Why would anyone want this?”. This is a common pitfall for startups, but it applies equally well to futurists (and retrofuturists).
"Engineers can grouse all they want, but the blunt fact is that in the long run, technology gets built because human consumers want it"
Gotta have that market test #1561710.
ah, sorry @0xbitcoiner -- probably got it from you, but then it lived as an opened tab for a few days #1561426
Glad you brought back Noah's post, it's seriously good. Your comments added a lot to it, and I have no idea why my post got so aggressively downzapped! ~lol
vs
lol, that seems unnecessary!!
A lot of the retrofuturism I've read is from Asimov and Clarke. One of the most striking things is how strongly they expected hovercrafts to emerge as the personal vehicle of choice.
I wonder if there's a true impracticality there or if it's a result of heavily subsidizing the competition, as one of the main benefits of hovercraft was saving on infrastructure costs.
I came here to talk about the subsidization of automobiles. We've spent 100 years building out a huge infrastructure for automobiles that makes them cheaper to get from A to B in most cases.
The flying car infrastructure is at zero (maybe they would benefit from being able to land in roads and park in driveways and such) but it's gotta be difficult to fully comprehend how difficult it is to compete against such infrastructure.
People may want a better keyboard than QWERTY, but the effort of learning a new keyboard never seems to be worth being able to type a little faster and so even our phones have QWERTY layouts. Does this mean consumers don't want it? I suppose so, but it also feels like that is a weak explanation for what is going on.
It's also hard to compete against legal prohibitions.
Some people can’t handle driving on roads. What makes you think they can handle flying in the sky? Ha.
That's pretty much dude's argument... what about drunk teenagers!
Good graphs and solid reasoning- much of which @denlillaapan ignores because it challenges his US Exceptionalist Libertarian hype and tribal bias.
China won the trade war in large part by producing bulk electricity supply and distribution at low cost via State Capitalism Central Planning feeding a mass scale of free enterprise producers and consumers - deal with it loser!
'J. Storrs Hall barely even mentions China in his book, and this is one of its biggest failings. We don’t have to think very hard about the hypothetical technological details of nuclear vs. solar; we can just watch what China does. China is ruthlessly focused on growing its economy, its manufacturing industries, and its geopolitical power; it is not swayed by hippie environmentalists. When coal was the cheapest power source, China burned as much as it could.
And yet now, China is building solar far faster than it’s building nuclear. Why? Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable. If this were not the case, China would not be transitioning its economy to solar power as rapidly as possible.
Why does American engineerism long for nuclear even after it’s clear it’s been surpassed (for most applications) by something even cheaper and better? My best guess is that this is a historical grudge. In the 70s and 80s, environmentalists told engineers they weren’t allowed to build nuclear power. A lot of engineers still chafe at being told what not to build, and some probably resent solar and batteries for being the things environmentalists told them to go build instead.
But this has resulted in a bunch of American engineers becoming trapped in a retrofuturistic daydream, unable to take advantage of the very real revolution in electric technology.'