Notes on Where Is My Flying Car?

March 12, 2023

In Where Is My Flying Car? J. Storrs Hall, a computer scientist and futurist, gives his explanation for why one of the most iconic science fiction ideas — a flying car — is not yet ubiquitous in our society. When I picked up the book, I almost surely thought the answer to the titular question was an absence of requisite technological advances; in other words, I believe that our tech simply wasn’t good enough. But Hall’s argument convinced me otherwise: we could easily have had flying cars by now. In fact, as he points out, we have already seen iterations of flying cars in helicopters and autogyros.

Although Hall gives many reasons to explain this technological stagnation, the most salient — or perhaps striking — one is surely that our collective motivation to do great and difficult things (as we saw from the start of the Industrial Revolution through the postwar period of the 20th century) has greatly diminished. This effect has been, in Hall’s eyes, both active and passive. It has been active insofar as the government has implemented innovation-unfriendly regulation and activists, especially those concerned about climate change, have stymied the development of cheap energy sources like nuclear. It has been passive to the extent that more smart people than ever before are not endeavoring to do great work, instead going into fields like law, finance, or the “ivory tower” of academia.

As someone interested in the possibilities of technology policy, this book provided an interesting — and I’d guess unpopular — perspective on a number of policy-adjacent issues. It also left me inspired to build. After explaining our past and present, Hall describes a future in which the worldwide standard of living jumps by another order of magnitude, a second Industrial Revolution of sorts. I want to contribute to that world, and so should you.

Notes

The three parts in Hall’s book are Profiles of the Past, Profiles of the Present, and Profiles of the Future. I’ll include my rough notes on each part in the following section:

Key concepts / terms introduced by Hall

• Henry Adams Curve
• Energy intensity of predicted technologies (plotting percent fulfillment of “promised” technologies vs. their energy intensity). TLDR; the more energy intense a technology, the less likely it was to be fulfilled.
• Great Stagnation (proposed by Tyler Cowen, but Hall disagrees on the explanation for why)
• The Machiavelli Effect
• Eloi Agonistes / ergophobia
• Failures of Nerve vs. Failures of Imagination
• Primacy of virtue signaling and cost disease in our institutions
• Besides computers and information technology, most science fiction predictions of the 20th century did not manifest
• Our technological future depends primarily on our vision, not the lack of adequate science.

Profiles of the Past (”What happened?”)

• Significantly higher airplane speeds
• Flying cars
• Nanotechnology
• “Power too cheap to meter” (including cold fusion)

Profiles of the Present (”What could have happened?”)

• Flying a plane (or flying car), though more difficult than a care due to our two-dimensional faculties, is not out of reach for most people.
• Would it be worth if for you to own a flying car? Yes, mostly.
• Nuclear power is dramatically cheaper than chemical (and safe).
• Following Feynman’s plan for nanotechnology is quite possible.
• Scientific knowledge (in contrast to technological applications) has largely kept advancing.

Profiles of the Future (”What could happen?”)

• Hall is advocating for a new Industrial Revolution that improves the lives of ordinary people by an order of magnitude.
• Robots that can totally understand human behavior and ethics, in a way that GPT-3 cannot (Hall refers to GPT as nothing but a “glib pastiche” of all the information on the web).
• The “Second Atomic Age”: nanotech and nuclear energy (fission, hot/cold fusion) will work synergistically.
• Flying cars that, unlike helicopters or gyros, can take off from your driveway and achieve airliner speeds (effectively a “private spaceship”).
• Human society desperately needs a space frontier to “pit ourselves against the universe.”
• Innovation in cities: taller buildings (miles-high), multileveled streets, seagoing cities, airborne villages, and more. Hall captures the essence of a city with a great quote: “[Cities] should be machines for facilitating commerce and social interactions.”
• World weather control, such as having automated mirrors that reflect, deflect, or capture sunlight as it hits the Earth. More generally, Hall describes just how much energy lies uncaptured in our galaxy and universe.