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Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past
Back in the 60s we were all sure there would be flying cars in our future. Were the futurists and SF writers of the day just wrong? Or has something more interesting and important happened? Will we ever get flying cars? This book offers a compelling analysis of the past and a surprising view of the future.
609 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 1, 2018
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October 14, 2018
If you only read the first 3 chapters, you might imagine that this is the history of just one industry (or the mysterious lack of an industry).
But this book attributes the absence of that industry to a broad set of problems that are keeping us poor. J. Storrs Hall (aka Josh) looks at the post-1970 slowdown in innovation that Cowen describes in The Great Stagnation[1]. The two books agree on many symptoms, but describe the causes differently: where Cowen says we ate the low hanging fruit, Josh says it's due to someone "spraying paraquat on the low-hanging fruit".
The book is full of mostly good insights. It significantly changed my opinion of the Great Stagnation.
The book jumps back and forth between polemics about the Great Strangulation (with a bit too much outrage porn), and nerdy descriptions of engineering and piloting problems. I found those large shifts in tone to be somewhat disorienting - it's like the author can't decide whether he's an autistic youth who is eagerly describing his latest obsession, or an angry old man complaining about how the world is going to hell (I've met the author at Foresight conferences, and got similar but milder impressions there).
Josh's main explanation for the Great Strangulation is the rise of Green fundamentalism[2], but he also describes other cultural / political factors that seem related. But before looking at those, I'll look in some depth at three industries that exemplify the Great Strangulation.
The good old days of Science Fiction
The leading SF writers of the mid 20th century made predictions for today that looked somewhat close to what we got in many areas, with a big set of exceptions in the areas around transportation and space exploration.
The absence of flying cars is used as an argument against futurists' ability to predict technology. This can't be dismissed as just a minor error of some obscure forecasters. It was a widespread vision of leading technologists.
Josh provides a decent argument that we should treat that absence as a clue to why U.S. economic growth slowed in the 1970s, and why growth is still disappointing.
Were those SF writers clueless optimists, making mostly random forecasting errors? No! Josh shows that for the least energy intensive technologies, their optimism was about right, and the more energy intensive the technology was, the more reality let them down.
Is it just a coincidence that people started worshiping energy conservation around the start of the Great Stagnation? Josh says no, we developed ergophobia - no, not the standard meaning of ergophobia: Josh has redefined it to mean fear of using energy.
Did flying cars prove to be technically harder than expected?
The simple answer is: mostly no. The people who predicted flying cars knew a fair amount about the difficulty, and we may have forgotten more than we've learned since then.
Josh describes, in more detail than I wanted, a wide variety of plausible approaches to building flying cars. None of them clearly qualify as low-hanging fruit, but they also don't look farther from our grasp than did flying machines in 1900.
How serious were the technical obstacles?
Air traffic control
Before reading this book, I assumed that there were serious technical problems here. In hindsight, that looks dumb.
Josh calculates that there's room for a million non-pressurized aircraft at one time, under current rules about distance between planes (assuming they're spread out evenly; it doesn't say all Tesla employees can land near their office at 9am). And he points out that seagull tornadoes (see this video) provide hints that current rules are many orders of magnitude away from any hard limits.
Regulators' fear of problems looks like an obstacle, but it's unclear whether anyone put much thought into solving them, and it doesn't look like the industry got far enough for this issue to be very important.
Skill
It seems unlikely that anywhere near as many people would learn to fly competently as have learned to drive. So this looks like a large obstacle for the average family, given 20th century technology.
But we didn't get close the point where that was a large obstacle to further adoption. And 21st century technology is making progress toward convenient ways of connecting competent pilots with people who want to fly, except where it's actively discouraged.
Cost
If the economic growth of 1945-1970 had continued, we'd be approaching wealth levels where people on a UBI ... oops, I mean on a national basic income could hope to afford an occasional ride in a flying Uber that comes to their door. At least if there were no political problems that drove up costs.
Weather
Weather will make flying cars a less predictable means than ground cars to get to a given destination. That seems to explain a modest fraction of people's reluctance to buy flying cars, but that explains at most a modest part of the puzzle.
Safety
"The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents."
I wasn't able to verify that, and other sources say that general aviation is roughly as dangerous as motorcycles. Motorcycles are dangerous enough that they'd likely be illegal if they hadn't been around before the Great Strangulation, so whether either of those are considered safe enough seems to depend on accidents of history.
People have irrational fears of risk, but there has also been a rational trend of people demanding more safety because we can now afford more safety. I expect this is a moderate part of why early SF writers overestimated demand for flying cars.
The liability crisis seems to have hit general aviation harder than it hit most other industries. I'm still unclear why.
"One of the more ironic regulatory pathologies that has shaped the world of general aviation is that most of the planes we fly are either 40 years old or homemade - and that we were forced into that position in the name of safety."
If the small aircraft industry hadn't mostly shut down, it's likely that new planes would have more safety features (airbags? whole-airplane parachutes?).
The flying car industry hit a number of speedbumps, such as WWII diverting talent and resources to other types of aviation, then a key entrepreneur being distracted by a patent dispute, and then was largely shut down by liability lawsuits. It seems like progress should have been a bit faster around 1950-1970 - I'm confused as to whether the industry did well then.
At any rate, it looks like liability lawsuits were the industry's biggest problem, and they combined with a more hostile culture and expensive energy to stop progress around 1980.
The book shifted my opinion from "those SF writers were confused" to "flying cars should be roughly as widespread as motorcycles". We should be close to having autopilots which eliminate the need for human pilots (and the same for motorcycles?), and then I'd consider it somewhat reasonable for the average family to have a flying car.
Nuclear Power
Josh emphasizes the importance of cheap energy for things such as flying cars, space travel, eradicating poverty, etc., and identifies nuclear power as the main technology that should have made energy increasingly affordable. So it seems important to check his claims about what went wrong with nuclear power.
He cites a study by Peter Lang, with this strange learning curve:
It shows a trend of costs declining with experience, just like a normal industry where there's some competition and where consumers seem to care about price. Then that trend was replaced by a clear example of cost disease[3]. I've previously blogged about the value of learning curves (aka experience curve effects) in forecasting.
This is pretty inconsistent with running out of low-hanging fruit, and is consistent with a broad class of political problems, including the hypothesis of hostile regulation, and also the hypothesis that nuclear markets were once competitive, then switched to having a good deal of monopoly power.
This is a pretty strong case that something avoidable went wrong, but leaves a good deal of uncertainty about what went wrong, and Josh seemed a little too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion here, so I investigated further[4]. I couldn't find anyone arguing that nuclear power hit technical problems around 1970, but then it's hard to find many people who try to explain nuclear cost trends at all.
This book chapter suggests there was a shift from engineering decisions being mostly made by the companies that were doing the construction, to mostly being determined by regulators. Since regulators have little incentive to care about cost, the effect seems fairly similar to the industry becoming a monopoly. Cost disease seems fairly normal for monopolies.
That chapter also points out the effects of regulatory delays on costs: "The increase in total construction time ... from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants."[5]
In sum, something went wrong with nuclear power. The problems look more political than technical. The resulting high cost of energy slowed economic progress by making some new technologies too expensive, and by diverting talent to energy conservation. And by protecting the fossil fuel industries, it caused millions of deaths, and maybe 174 Gt of unnecessary CO2 emissions (about 31% of all man-made CO2 emissions).
This book convinced me that I'd underestimated how important nuclear power could have been.
Nanotech
"So the technology of the Second Atomic Age will be a confluence of two strongly synergistic atomic technologies: nanotech and nuclear."
The book has a chapter on the feasibility of Feynman / Drexler style nanotech, which attempts to find a compromise between Drexler's excruciatingly technical Nanosystems and his science-fiction style Engines of Creation. That compromise will convince a few people who weren't convinced by Drexler, but most people will either find it insufficiently technical, or else hard to follow because it requires a good deal of technical knowledge.
Josh explains some key parts of why the government didn't fund research into the Feynman / Drexler vision of nanotech: centralization and bureaucratization of research funding, plus the Machiavelli Effect - the old order opposes change, and beneficiaries of change "do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."
Josh describes the mainstream reaction to nanotech fairly well, but that's not the whole story.
Why didn't the military fund nanotech? Nanotech would likely exist today if we had credible fears of Al Qaeda researching it in 2001. But my fear of a nanotech arms race exceeds my desire to use nanotech.
Many VCs would get confused by top academics who dismissed (straw-man versions of) Drexler's vision. But there are a few VCs such as Steve Jurvetson who understand Drexler's ideas well enough to not be confused by that smoke. With those VCs, the explanation is no entrepreneurs tried a sufficiently incremental path
Most approaches to nanotech require a long enough series of development steps to achieve a marketable product that VCs won't fund them. That's not a foolish mistake on VCs part - they have sensible reasons to think that some other company will get most of the rewards (how much did Xerox get from PARC's UI innovations?). Josh promotes an approach to nanotech that seems more likely to produce intermediate products which will sell. As far as I know, no entrepreneurs attempted to follow that path (maybe because it looked too long and slow?).
The patent system has been marketed as a solution to this kind of problem, but it seems designed for a hedgehog-like model of innovation, when what we ought to be incentivizing is a more fox-like innovation process.
Mostly there isn't a good system of funding technologies that take more than 5 years to generate products.
If government funding got this right during the golden age of SF, the hard questions should be focused more on what went right then, than on what is wrong with funding now. But I'm guessing there was no golden age in which basic R&D got appropriate funding, except when we were lucky enough for popular opinion to support the technologies in question.
Problems with these three industries aren't enough to explain the stagnation, but Josh convinced me that the problems which affected these industries are more pervasive, affecting pretty much all energy-intensive technologies.
Culture and politics
"Of all the great improvements in know-how expected by the classic science-fiction writers, competent government was the one we got the least."
I'll focus now on the underlying causes of stagnation.
Green fundamentalism and ergophobia are arguably sufficient to explain the hostility to nuclear power and aviation, but it's less clear how they explain the liability crisis or the stagnation in nanotech.
Josh also mentions a variety of other cultural currents, each of which explain some of the problems. I expect these are strongly overlapping effects, but I won't be surprised if they sound as disjointed as they did in the book.
It matters whether we fear an all-seeing god. From the book Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict:
From Peter Turchin: when an empire becomes big enough to stop worrying about external threats to its existence, the cooperative "we're all in the same boat" spirit is replaced by a "winner take all" mentality.
"the evolutionary pressures to what we consider moral behavior arise only in non-zero-sum interactions. In a dynamic, growing society, people can interact cooperatively and both come out ahead. In a static no-growth society, pressures toward morality and cooperation vanish;"
Self deception is less valuable on a frontier where you're struggling with nature than it is when most struggles involve social interaction, where self-deception makes virtue signaling easier.
"If your neighbor is Saving the Planet, it seems somehow less valuable merely to keep clean water running".
"Technologies that provoke antipathy and promote discord, such as social networks, are the order of the day; technologies that empower everyone but require a background of mutual trust and cooperation, such as flying cars, are considered amusing anachronisms."
Those were Josh's points. I'll add these thoughts:
It's likely that cultural changes led competent engineers to lose interest in working for regulatory agencies. I don't think Josh said that explicitly, but it seems to follow fairly naturally from what he does say.
Josh refers to Robin Hanson a fair amount, but doesn't mention Robin's suggestion that increasing wealth lets us return to forager values. "Big god" values are clearly farmer values.
Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations (listed in the bibliography, without explanation), predicted in 1982 that special interests would be an increasing drag on growth in stable nations. His reasoning differs a fair amount from Josh's, but their conclusions sound fairly similar.
Josh often focuses on Greens as if they're a large part of the problem, but I'm inclined to focus more on the erosion of trust and cooperation, and treat the Greens more as a symptom.
The most destructive aspects of Green fundamentalism can be explained by special interests, such as coal companies and demagogues, who manipulate long-standing prejudices for new purposes. How much of Great Strangulation was due to special interests such as coal companies? I don't know, but it looks like the coal industry would have died by 2000 (according to Peter Lang) if the pre-1970 trends in nuclear power had continued.
Green religious ideas explain hostility to energy-intensive technologies, but I have doubts about whether that would be translated into effective action. Greens could have caused cultural changes that shifted the best and the brightest away from wealth creation and toward litigation.
That attempt to attribute the stagnation mainly to Greens seems a bit weaker than the special interests explanation. But I remain very uncertain about whether there's a single cause, or whether it took several independent errors to cause the stagnation.
What now? I don't see how we could just turn on a belief in a big god. The book says we'll likely prosper in spite of the problems discussed here, but leaves me a bit gloomy about achieving our full potential.
The book could use a better way of labeling environmentalists who aren't Green fundamentalists. Josh clearly understands that there are big differences between Green fundamentalists and people with pragmatic motives for reducing pollution or preserving parks. Even when people adopt Green values mostly for signaling purposes, there are important differences between safe rituals, such as recycling, and signals that protect the coal industry.
Yet standard political terminology makes it sound like attacks on the Greens signal hostility to all of those groups. I wish Josh took more care to signal a narrower focus of hostility.
Ironically for a book that complains about virtue signaling, a fair amount of the book looks like virtue signaling. Maybe that gave him a license to ignore mundane things like publicizing the book (I couldn't find a mention of the book on his flying car blog until 3 months after it was published).
Has the act of writing this review licensed me to forget about being effective? I'm a bit worried.
[continued on my blog.]
But this book attributes the absence of that industry to a broad set of problems that are keeping us poor. J. Storrs Hall (aka Josh) looks at the post-1970 slowdown in innovation that Cowen describes in The Great Stagnation[1]. The two books agree on many symptoms, but describe the causes differently: where Cowen says we ate the low hanging fruit, Josh says it's due to someone "spraying paraquat on the low-hanging fruit".
The book is full of mostly good insights. It significantly changed my opinion of the Great Stagnation.
The book jumps back and forth between polemics about the Great Strangulation (with a bit too much outrage porn), and nerdy descriptions of engineering and piloting problems. I found those large shifts in tone to be somewhat disorienting - it's like the author can't decide whether he's an autistic youth who is eagerly describing his latest obsession, or an angry old man complaining about how the world is going to hell (I've met the author at Foresight conferences, and got similar but milder impressions there).
Josh's main explanation for the Great Strangulation is the rise of Green fundamentalism[2], but he also describes other cultural / political factors that seem related. But before looking at those, I'll look in some depth at three industries that exemplify the Great Strangulation.
The good old days of Science Fiction
The leading SF writers of the mid 20th century made predictions for today that looked somewhat close to what we got in many areas, with a big set of exceptions in the areas around transportation and space exploration.
The absence of flying cars is used as an argument against futurists' ability to predict technology. This can't be dismissed as just a minor error of some obscure forecasters. It was a widespread vision of leading technologists.
Josh provides a decent argument that we should treat that absence as a clue to why U.S. economic growth slowed in the 1970s, and why growth is still disappointing.
Were those SF writers clueless optimists, making mostly random forecasting errors? No! Josh shows that for the least energy intensive technologies, their optimism was about right, and the more energy intensive the technology was, the more reality let them down.
Is it just a coincidence that people started worshiping energy conservation around the start of the Great Stagnation? Josh says no, we developed ergophobia - no, not the standard meaning of ergophobia: Josh has redefined it to mean fear of using energy.
Did flying cars prove to be technically harder than expected?
The simple answer is: mostly no. The people who predicted flying cars knew a fair amount about the difficulty, and we may have forgotten more than we've learned since then.
Josh describes, in more detail than I wanted, a wide variety of plausible approaches to building flying cars. None of them clearly qualify as low-hanging fruit, but they also don't look farther from our grasp than did flying machines in 1900.
How serious were the technical obstacles?
Air traffic control
Before reading this book, I assumed that there were serious technical problems here. In hindsight, that looks dumb.
Josh calculates that there's room for a million non-pressurized aircraft at one time, under current rules about distance between planes (assuming they're spread out evenly; it doesn't say all Tesla employees can land near their office at 9am). And he points out that seagull tornadoes (see this video) provide hints that current rules are many orders of magnitude away from any hard limits.
Regulators' fear of problems looks like an obstacle, but it's unclear whether anyone put much thought into solving them, and it doesn't look like the industry got far enough for this issue to be very important.
Skill
It seems unlikely that anywhere near as many people would learn to fly competently as have learned to drive. So this looks like a large obstacle for the average family, given 20th century technology.
But we didn't get close the point where that was a large obstacle to further adoption. And 21st century technology is making progress toward convenient ways of connecting competent pilots with people who want to fly, except where it's actively discouraged.
Cost
If the economic growth of 1945-1970 had continued, we'd be approaching wealth levels where people on a UBI ... oops, I mean on a national basic income could hope to afford an occasional ride in a flying Uber that comes to their door. At least if there were no political problems that drove up costs.
Weather
Weather will make flying cars a less predictable means than ground cars to get to a given destination. That seems to explain a modest fraction of people's reluctance to buy flying cars, but that explains at most a modest part of the puzzle.
Safety
"The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents."
I wasn't able to verify that, and other sources say that general aviation is roughly as dangerous as motorcycles. Motorcycles are dangerous enough that they'd likely be illegal if they hadn't been around before the Great Strangulation, so whether either of those are considered safe enough seems to depend on accidents of history.
People have irrational fears of risk, but there has also been a rational trend of people demanding more safety because we can now afford more safety. I expect this is a moderate part of why early SF writers overestimated demand for flying cars.
The liability crisis seems to have hit general aviation harder than it hit most other industries. I'm still unclear why.
"One of the more ironic regulatory pathologies that has shaped the world of general aviation is that most of the planes we fly are either 40 years old or homemade - and that we were forced into that position in the name of safety."
If the small aircraft industry hadn't mostly shut down, it's likely that new planes would have more safety features (airbags? whole-airplane parachutes?).
The flying car industry hit a number of speedbumps, such as WWII diverting talent and resources to other types of aviation, then a key entrepreneur being distracted by a patent dispute, and then was largely shut down by liability lawsuits. It seems like progress should have been a bit faster around 1950-1970 - I'm confused as to whether the industry did well then.
At any rate, it looks like liability lawsuits were the industry's biggest problem, and they combined with a more hostile culture and expensive energy to stop progress around 1980.
The book shifted my opinion from "those SF writers were confused" to "flying cars should be roughly as widespread as motorcycles". We should be close to having autopilots which eliminate the need for human pilots (and the same for motorcycles?), and then I'd consider it somewhat reasonable for the average family to have a flying car.
Nuclear Power
Josh emphasizes the importance of cheap energy for things such as flying cars, space travel, eradicating poverty, etc., and identifies nuclear power as the main technology that should have made energy increasingly affordable. So it seems important to check his claims about what went wrong with nuclear power.
He cites a study by Peter Lang, with this strange learning curve:
It shows a trend of costs declining with experience, just like a normal industry where there's some competition and where consumers seem to care about price. Then that trend was replaced by a clear example of cost disease[3]. I've previously blogged about the value of learning curves (aka experience curve effects) in forecasting.
This is pretty inconsistent with running out of low-hanging fruit, and is consistent with a broad class of political problems, including the hypothesis of hostile regulation, and also the hypothesis that nuclear markets were once competitive, then switched to having a good deal of monopoly power.
This is a pretty strong case that something avoidable went wrong, but leaves a good deal of uncertainty about what went wrong, and Josh seemed a little too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion here, so I investigated further[4]. I couldn't find anyone arguing that nuclear power hit technical problems around 1970, but then it's hard to find many people who try to explain nuclear cost trends at all.
This book chapter suggests there was a shift from engineering decisions being mostly made by the companies that were doing the construction, to mostly being determined by regulators. Since regulators have little incentive to care about cost, the effect seems fairly similar to the industry becoming a monopoly. Cost disease seems fairly normal for monopolies.
That chapter also points out the effects of regulatory delays on costs: "The increase in total construction time ... from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants."[5]
In sum, something went wrong with nuclear power. The problems look more political than technical. The resulting high cost of energy slowed economic progress by making some new technologies too expensive, and by diverting talent to energy conservation. And by protecting the fossil fuel industries, it caused millions of deaths, and maybe 174 Gt of unnecessary CO2 emissions (about 31% of all man-made CO2 emissions).
This book convinced me that I'd underestimated how important nuclear power could have been.
Nanotech
"So the technology of the Second Atomic Age will be a confluence of two strongly synergistic atomic technologies: nanotech and nuclear."
The book has a chapter on the feasibility of Feynman / Drexler style nanotech, which attempts to find a compromise between Drexler's excruciatingly technical Nanosystems and his science-fiction style Engines of Creation. That compromise will convince a few people who weren't convinced by Drexler, but most people will either find it insufficiently technical, or else hard to follow because it requires a good deal of technical knowledge.
Josh explains some key parts of why the government didn't fund research into the Feynman / Drexler vision of nanotech: centralization and bureaucratization of research funding, plus the Machiavelli Effect - the old order opposes change, and beneficiaries of change "do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."
Josh describes the mainstream reaction to nanotech fairly well, but that's not the whole story.
Why didn't the military fund nanotech? Nanotech would likely exist today if we had credible fears of Al Qaeda researching it in 2001. But my fear of a nanotech arms race exceeds my desire to use nanotech.
Many VCs would get confused by top academics who dismissed (straw-man versions of) Drexler's vision. But there are a few VCs such as Steve Jurvetson who understand Drexler's ideas well enough to not be confused by that smoke. With those VCs, the explanation is no entrepreneurs tried a sufficiently incremental path
Most approaches to nanotech require a long enough series of development steps to achieve a marketable product that VCs won't fund them. That's not a foolish mistake on VCs part - they have sensible reasons to think that some other company will get most of the rewards (how much did Xerox get from PARC's UI innovations?). Josh promotes an approach to nanotech that seems more likely to produce intermediate products which will sell. As far as I know, no entrepreneurs attempted to follow that path (maybe because it looked too long and slow?).
The patent system has been marketed as a solution to this kind of problem, but it seems designed for a hedgehog-like model of innovation, when what we ought to be incentivizing is a more fox-like innovation process.
Mostly there isn't a good system of funding technologies that take more than 5 years to generate products.
If government funding got this right during the golden age of SF, the hard questions should be focused more on what went right then, than on what is wrong with funding now. But I'm guessing there was no golden age in which basic R&D got appropriate funding, except when we were lucky enough for popular opinion to support the technologies in question.
Problems with these three industries aren't enough to explain the stagnation, but Josh convinced me that the problems which affected these industries are more pervasive, affecting pretty much all energy-intensive technologies.
Culture and politics
"Of all the great improvements in know-how expected by the classic science-fiction writers, competent government was the one we got the least."
I'll focus now on the underlying causes of stagnation.
Green fundamentalism and ergophobia are arguably sufficient to explain the hostility to nuclear power and aviation, but it's less clear how they explain the liability crisis or the stagnation in nanotech.
Josh also mentions a variety of other cultural currents, each of which explain some of the problems. I expect these are strongly overlapping effects, but I won't be surprised if they sound as disjointed as they did in the book.
It matters whether we fear an all-seeing god. From the book Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict:
In a civilization where a belief in a Big God is effectively universal, there is a major advantage in the kind of things you can do collectively. In today's America, you can't be trusted to ride on an airliner with a nail file. How could you be trusted driving your own 1000-horsepower flying car? ... The green religion, on the other hand, instead of enhancing people's innate conscience, tends to degrade it, in a phenomenon called "licensing." People who virtue-signal by buying organic products are more likely to cheat and steal[6]
From Peter Turchin: when an empire becomes big enough to stop worrying about external threats to its existence, the cooperative "we're all in the same boat" spirit is replaced by a "winner take all" mentality.
"the evolutionary pressures to what we consider moral behavior arise only in non-zero-sum interactions. In a dynamic, growing society, people can interact cooperatively and both come out ahead. In a static no-growth society, pressures toward morality and cooperation vanish;"
Self deception is less valuable on a frontier where you're struggling with nature than it is when most struggles involve social interaction, where self-deception makes virtue signaling easier.
"If your neighbor is Saving the Planet, it seems somehow less valuable merely to keep clean water running".
"Technologies that provoke antipathy and promote discord, such as social networks, are the order of the day; technologies that empower everyone but require a background of mutual trust and cooperation, such as flying cars, are considered amusing anachronisms."
Those were Josh's points. I'll add these thoughts:
It's likely that cultural changes led competent engineers to lose interest in working for regulatory agencies. I don't think Josh said that explicitly, but it seems to follow fairly naturally from what he does say.
Josh refers to Robin Hanson a fair amount, but doesn't mention Robin's suggestion that increasing wealth lets us return to forager values. "Big god" values are clearly farmer values.
Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations (listed in the bibliography, without explanation), predicted in 1982 that special interests would be an increasing drag on growth in stable nations. His reasoning differs a fair amount from Josh's, but their conclusions sound fairly similar.
Josh often focuses on Greens as if they're a large part of the problem, but I'm inclined to focus more on the erosion of trust and cooperation, and treat the Greens more as a symptom.
The most destructive aspects of Green fundamentalism can be explained by special interests, such as coal companies and demagogues, who manipulate long-standing prejudices for new purposes. How much of Great Strangulation was due to special interests such as coal companies? I don't know, but it looks like the coal industry would have died by 2000 (according to Peter Lang) if the pre-1970 trends in nuclear power had continued.
Green religious ideas explain hostility to energy-intensive technologies, but I have doubts about whether that would be translated into effective action. Greens could have caused cultural changes that shifted the best and the brightest away from wealth creation and toward litigation.
That attempt to attribute the stagnation mainly to Greens seems a bit weaker than the special interests explanation. But I remain very uncertain about whether there's a single cause, or whether it took several independent errors to cause the stagnation.
What now? I don't see how we could just turn on a belief in a big god. The book says we'll likely prosper in spite of the problems discussed here, but leaves me a bit gloomy about achieving our full potential.
The book could use a better way of labeling environmentalists who aren't Green fundamentalists. Josh clearly understands that there are big differences between Green fundamentalists and people with pragmatic motives for reducing pollution or preserving parks. Even when people adopt Green values mostly for signaling purposes, there are important differences between safe rituals, such as recycling, and signals that protect the coal industry.
Yet standard political terminology makes it sound like attacks on the Greens signal hostility to all of those groups. I wish Josh took more care to signal a narrower focus of hostility.
Ironically for a book that complains about virtue signaling, a fair amount of the book looks like virtue signaling. Maybe that gave him a license to ignore mundane things like publicizing the book (I couldn't find a mention of the book on his flying car blog until 3 months after it was published).
Has the act of writing this review licensed me to forget about being effective? I'm a bit worried.
[continued on my blog.]
October 29, 2020
A refreshingly idiosyncratic, indulgent book, expressive of its author's whole personality in a way that no anodyne pop-science or academic non-fiction could touch. That alone makes it a fun read, but it's also a bracing wake-up call to the imagination and a compelling-if-not-entirely-satisfying exploration of the dynamics of cultural evolution in technological progress (very much in the classic sense of that phrase).
Most of the book is framed around the titular flying car. There are tons of chapters here on the aviation history, design challenges, travel theory, infrastructure considerations, traffic management, etc, involved in getting from a world with no human flight to a world where flying cars are as accessible as high-end pickup trucks. The point of all of it is to answer, with as much careful consideration as possible, the question of why sci-fi writers of the early 20th century accurately predicted so much about current technology but overestimated the proximity of the flying car. Was there some unanticipated technical hurdle that made this intuitive technology out of reach? Or did something happen to knock us off course from achieving what was within our grasp?
Hall is decisively in the latter camp. He has a hypothesis about what happened and he's got a chip on his shoulder about it. There's no real secret of that. But that doesn't mean he doesn't take the challenges seriously. It feels open-minded and even-handed when it comes to the tradeoffs and logistical obstacles on the flying car question. He points out that helicopters are, in essence, flying cars, but that there are good reasons they were not able to fill the role. Good reasons, as opposed to regulation. One of the major points in the flying car-specific material is that private aircraft ownership and private pilot's licensing were growing rapidly until regulations hit in the 80's that basically killed the industry. If that hadn't happened, perhaps innovation in the intervening years would have finessed the tradeoffs in a viable way. But the overall conclusion is that that's not especially likely. More planes would just mean more planes, because the flying car challenge requires something special: a revolution in energy density and materials science.
This is where the flying car bit becomes merely a case study for the book's overall point, which gets applied to practically everything Hall can think of--or perhaps, everything he read about in scifi books as a kid (every subsection of each chapter has multiple epigraphs, many of which are from Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and older scifi). The thesis of the book is essentially that the world was on an exponential growth curve in total energy output until around 1970, when it became linear. And if that energy growth had continued, the world today would be utterly transformed. So many things now challenging would become possible. The second point, which seems to get less direct exposition because it was the subject of Hall's previous book, is that nanotechnology, which can be used to create materials with properties vastly exceeding what we can do now, could have been much farther advanced had we taken a different approach to its development than we did. These two technologies combined, for Hall, enable not just another industrial revolution but a Second Atomic Age (since the power density he envisions is one way or another nuclear), something that would trivialize essentially every problem many people currently take to be intractable and catastrophic.
If I'd read this 10 years ago, I would have had no patience with its claim at all. It is *exactly* the sort of appeal-to-technology that anti-civ, degrowth, and deep ecology types are sworn enemies of. Fortunately I'm not in that camp anymore so I can consider Hall's case with an open mind. And not entirely coincidentally, it dovetails very nicely with the conclusions I've recently come to in my research on overpopulation. The emphasis environmentalists place on fossil fuels is, I now believe, vastly overstated. The cause of the Industrial Revolution was not fossil fuels but the accumulation of the cultural adaptive potential driving technological progress. Since coming to that realization, even moreso than from my interest in cultural evolution more broadly, has changed my feelings on technology. I feel a lot more interested not than I was 10 years ago in things like appliance design or manufacturing processes, because they make simple and accessible the process of ratcheting, iterative problem solving and design that occurs in evolution on a scale that is utterly incomprehensible. It's a window into the mind of the mindless designer.
The interesting thing revealed by the few glimpses I've taken through channels like Technology Connections and Stuff Made Here is that human technology is still extremely crude. Part of the appeal of a lot of TC videos in particular is that while appliances require some knowledge of physics or access to some rare, purified materials, their design is elegantly simple. And while the same can be said of many specific things in nature, in aggregate, living things are just a mess by contrast. When you think about it that way, Hall's argument starts to make a lot of sense. Once cultural evolution gains the ability to work on the same molecular scale as genetic evolution has done for the past 4 billion years, then we're in for some real changes.
The most interesting thing about this book for me was simply to sort of shake up the breadth of my imagination of the scope of cultural evolution. The path that brought us the capacities we have today was obviously not inevitable, but what we spend less time considering is that given the unconstrained pace and compounding, ratcheting nature of cultural evolution, the range of possibilities is much wider than we tend to appreciate. Things could, obviously, easily be much worse, in a dozen different ways. But they might very well also have been better. In the most obvious case, if nuclear power had continued to proliferate on its original exponential trajectory, it would be cheaper, safer, and more portable than ever, with a different set of social norms about radiation and a wide range of secondary products like batteries. We would have seen the same learning-by-doing there as we're seeing now in solar, but before the majority of greenhouse gasses were emitted, before the most egregious petroleum and coal extraction atrocities were committed, before fracking or tar sands exploitation were even invented. There's nothing speculative about it; it obviously could have happened and didn't for reasons that in retrospect seem deeply foolish.
So why did it, and similar cases of missed potential, turn out that way? In my mind this is by far the most important and interesting question Hall raises--kind of a negative inverse to Mokyr's Culture of Growth. And he's not really prepared to explore it. This really is just a book about flying cars and nanotech and the conceivable pathways to golden age scifi tech like floating cities and jetpacks and stuff. There are answers; they're just not probed with any kind of scholarly caution or curiosity. They're thrown out with a bitter sense of factional animosity. Half of his answer is the "Machiavelli Effect," in which scholars with a favored approach are able to quash competing ideas utterly, through some combination of social sway and institutional control--this is why Hall believes nanotech went the wrong direction, for instance.
The other, more important half, is "ergophobia." Fear of wasting and overusing energy led a generation of effort to be wasted on efficient use of fossil fuels and not actually finding huge new energy sources (which just leads to Jevons paradox results on one hand or regulatory caps on the other, both bad outcomes for Hall). The funny thing about this is that it's the diametric opposite of the degrowth ideology I just read in Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet--which of course doesn't do much to help Hall's credibility, even if I were otherwise inclined to agree with him. His case is that while recent turns to science have broken the habit a bit, people are fundamentally superstitious and we just have an unshakable, irrational aversion to having and using power, which was able to reassert itself and quash progress as soon as we were economically comfortable enough to lose our desperation for power. But while I have certainly made statements about the "green religion" that aren't too far out of line with Hall's disparaging take myself, I think this causal reasoning is ludicrous. His implication that environmentalist baptists and oil industry bootleggers quashed nuclear power is much closer to the truth, I think--this example was somewhat sobering for me, since it showed me that I'd almost without thinking internalized a faith in market forces to overcome obstacles to profitable outcomes that made me skeptical of the potential harms of regulation. The nuclear story shows regulations can do real harm, and harm that accumulates over years of lost progress. But the idea that environmentalists have superstitious, irrational values and motivations is hogwash.
The funny part is that Hall's argument is extremely compatible with a genuinely environmentalist value and goalset. His point about nuclear energy would fit extremely well with an argument that followed his but *was* itself concerned about climate change and habitat loss and extinction rates. But he's not that guy and he's not gonna hide it. Hall is a climate skeptic. He believes the process is occurring, driven by fossil fuel emissions, but he is convinced by low estimates of economic impact and argues that ignoring it and focusing on growth would leave us better off in 100 years than wasting time and effort on fighting it in ways that will mostly probably not work. And like, if you were going to use that argument to make a point about nuclear power, it works. If you're going to use it to say nanotech will vastly accelerate decoupling: great. But to just say you think there's no concern at all? Looks sketch, reduces his credibility as a forecaster of the future in general and saps some of the benefit of the doubt on his concern for the poor (though overall I'm totally on board that technological growth is a much more promising way to end poverty than redistribution).
So there are plenty of questions left up in the air here by his incomplete hypotheses, but without a more thorough investigation, there's not much more to do than speculate. It's all "accident of history" stuff--what if the fossil fuel industry had held less sway in the US? What if other, freer countries had had larger markets, to lessen the influence of US or EU regulation? Why didn't China or Russia take up the nanotech or nuclear mantle? Etc. Going forward, though, Hall is optimistic (it's in the nature of a futurist) that technological progress will sidestep the regulatory and political barriers that have held us back for the last 50 years. Drone tech is opening a new path to flying cars. AI and robots are at least on track where they should be. Biotech is creating an alternate path to nanotech. Etc. We'll get there long before we have to worry about catastrophic climate change, one way or another, he assures us. And I guess based on my overpopulation article, I kinda agree with him. I just think to get there, we need a much more serious, scholarly account of the pathologies of cultural evolution and some tactics on how to overcome them.
Most of the book is framed around the titular flying car. There are tons of chapters here on the aviation history, design challenges, travel theory, infrastructure considerations, traffic management, etc, involved in getting from a world with no human flight to a world where flying cars are as accessible as high-end pickup trucks. The point of all of it is to answer, with as much careful consideration as possible, the question of why sci-fi writers of the early 20th century accurately predicted so much about current technology but overestimated the proximity of the flying car. Was there some unanticipated technical hurdle that made this intuitive technology out of reach? Or did something happen to knock us off course from achieving what was within our grasp?
Hall is decisively in the latter camp. He has a hypothesis about what happened and he's got a chip on his shoulder about it. There's no real secret of that. But that doesn't mean he doesn't take the challenges seriously. It feels open-minded and even-handed when it comes to the tradeoffs and logistical obstacles on the flying car question. He points out that helicopters are, in essence, flying cars, but that there are good reasons they were not able to fill the role. Good reasons, as opposed to regulation. One of the major points in the flying car-specific material is that private aircraft ownership and private pilot's licensing were growing rapidly until regulations hit in the 80's that basically killed the industry. If that hadn't happened, perhaps innovation in the intervening years would have finessed the tradeoffs in a viable way. But the overall conclusion is that that's not especially likely. More planes would just mean more planes, because the flying car challenge requires something special: a revolution in energy density and materials science.
This is where the flying car bit becomes merely a case study for the book's overall point, which gets applied to practically everything Hall can think of--or perhaps, everything he read about in scifi books as a kid (every subsection of each chapter has multiple epigraphs, many of which are from Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and older scifi). The thesis of the book is essentially that the world was on an exponential growth curve in total energy output until around 1970, when it became linear. And if that energy growth had continued, the world today would be utterly transformed. So many things now challenging would become possible. The second point, which seems to get less direct exposition because it was the subject of Hall's previous book, is that nanotechnology, which can be used to create materials with properties vastly exceeding what we can do now, could have been much farther advanced had we taken a different approach to its development than we did. These two technologies combined, for Hall, enable not just another industrial revolution but a Second Atomic Age (since the power density he envisions is one way or another nuclear), something that would trivialize essentially every problem many people currently take to be intractable and catastrophic.
If I'd read this 10 years ago, I would have had no patience with its claim at all. It is *exactly* the sort of appeal-to-technology that anti-civ, degrowth, and deep ecology types are sworn enemies of. Fortunately I'm not in that camp anymore so I can consider Hall's case with an open mind. And not entirely coincidentally, it dovetails very nicely with the conclusions I've recently come to in my research on overpopulation. The emphasis environmentalists place on fossil fuels is, I now believe, vastly overstated. The cause of the Industrial Revolution was not fossil fuels but the accumulation of the cultural adaptive potential driving technological progress. Since coming to that realization, even moreso than from my interest in cultural evolution more broadly, has changed my feelings on technology. I feel a lot more interested not than I was 10 years ago in things like appliance design or manufacturing processes, because they make simple and accessible the process of ratcheting, iterative problem solving and design that occurs in evolution on a scale that is utterly incomprehensible. It's a window into the mind of the mindless designer.
The interesting thing revealed by the few glimpses I've taken through channels like Technology Connections and Stuff Made Here is that human technology is still extremely crude. Part of the appeal of a lot of TC videos in particular is that while appliances require some knowledge of physics or access to some rare, purified materials, their design is elegantly simple. And while the same can be said of many specific things in nature, in aggregate, living things are just a mess by contrast. When you think about it that way, Hall's argument starts to make a lot of sense. Once cultural evolution gains the ability to work on the same molecular scale as genetic evolution has done for the past 4 billion years, then we're in for some real changes.
The most interesting thing about this book for me was simply to sort of shake up the breadth of my imagination of the scope of cultural evolution. The path that brought us the capacities we have today was obviously not inevitable, but what we spend less time considering is that given the unconstrained pace and compounding, ratcheting nature of cultural evolution, the range of possibilities is much wider than we tend to appreciate. Things could, obviously, easily be much worse, in a dozen different ways. But they might very well also have been better. In the most obvious case, if nuclear power had continued to proliferate on its original exponential trajectory, it would be cheaper, safer, and more portable than ever, with a different set of social norms about radiation and a wide range of secondary products like batteries. We would have seen the same learning-by-doing there as we're seeing now in solar, but before the majority of greenhouse gasses were emitted, before the most egregious petroleum and coal extraction atrocities were committed, before fracking or tar sands exploitation were even invented. There's nothing speculative about it; it obviously could have happened and didn't for reasons that in retrospect seem deeply foolish.
So why did it, and similar cases of missed potential, turn out that way? In my mind this is by far the most important and interesting question Hall raises--kind of a negative inverse to Mokyr's Culture of Growth. And he's not really prepared to explore it. This really is just a book about flying cars and nanotech and the conceivable pathways to golden age scifi tech like floating cities and jetpacks and stuff. There are answers; they're just not probed with any kind of scholarly caution or curiosity. They're thrown out with a bitter sense of factional animosity. Half of his answer is the "Machiavelli Effect," in which scholars with a favored approach are able to quash competing ideas utterly, through some combination of social sway and institutional control--this is why Hall believes nanotech went the wrong direction, for instance.
The other, more important half, is "ergophobia." Fear of wasting and overusing energy led a generation of effort to be wasted on efficient use of fossil fuels and not actually finding huge new energy sources (which just leads to Jevons paradox results on one hand or regulatory caps on the other, both bad outcomes for Hall). The funny thing about this is that it's the diametric opposite of the degrowth ideology I just read in Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet--which of course doesn't do much to help Hall's credibility, even if I were otherwise inclined to agree with him. His case is that while recent turns to science have broken the habit a bit, people are fundamentally superstitious and we just have an unshakable, irrational aversion to having and using power, which was able to reassert itself and quash progress as soon as we were economically comfortable enough to lose our desperation for power. But while I have certainly made statements about the "green religion" that aren't too far out of line with Hall's disparaging take myself, I think this causal reasoning is ludicrous. His implication that environmentalist baptists and oil industry bootleggers quashed nuclear power is much closer to the truth, I think--this example was somewhat sobering for me, since it showed me that I'd almost without thinking internalized a faith in market forces to overcome obstacles to profitable outcomes that made me skeptical of the potential harms of regulation. The nuclear story shows regulations can do real harm, and harm that accumulates over years of lost progress. But the idea that environmentalists have superstitious, irrational values and motivations is hogwash.
The funny part is that Hall's argument is extremely compatible with a genuinely environmentalist value and goalset. His point about nuclear energy would fit extremely well with an argument that followed his but *was* itself concerned about climate change and habitat loss and extinction rates. But he's not that guy and he's not gonna hide it. Hall is a climate skeptic. He believes the process is occurring, driven by fossil fuel emissions, but he is convinced by low estimates of economic impact and argues that ignoring it and focusing on growth would leave us better off in 100 years than wasting time and effort on fighting it in ways that will mostly probably not work. And like, if you were going to use that argument to make a point about nuclear power, it works. If you're going to use it to say nanotech will vastly accelerate decoupling: great. But to just say you think there's no concern at all? Looks sketch, reduces his credibility as a forecaster of the future in general and saps some of the benefit of the doubt on his concern for the poor (though overall I'm totally on board that technological growth is a much more promising way to end poverty than redistribution).
So there are plenty of questions left up in the air here by his incomplete hypotheses, but without a more thorough investigation, there's not much more to do than speculate. It's all "accident of history" stuff--what if the fossil fuel industry had held less sway in the US? What if other, freer countries had had larger markets, to lessen the influence of US or EU regulation? Why didn't China or Russia take up the nanotech or nuclear mantle? Etc. Going forward, though, Hall is optimistic (it's in the nature of a futurist) that technological progress will sidestep the regulatory and political barriers that have held us back for the last 50 years. Drone tech is opening a new path to flying cars. AI and robots are at least on track where they should be. Biotech is creating an alternate path to nanotech. Etc. We'll get there long before we have to worry about catastrophic climate change, one way or another, he assures us. And I guess based on my overpopulation article, I kinda agree with him. I just think to get there, we need a much more serious, scholarly account of the pathologies of cultural evolution and some tactics on how to overcome them.
October 12, 2022
Trying to figure out where to start on this review. I think it's: 🤯
In this self-published, Kindle-only book (just $4.12 CAD! Apparently it's $π USD) J. Storrs Hall digs deeply into the question of why we don't have flying cars, which is ostensibly the focus. However I think the back half of the title "A Memoir of Future Past" is actually the focus: why isn't the future (i.e., the present) as awesome as we thought it would be? Why don't we have cheap, near-infinite clean energy? Why are healthcare and education so expensive? And yes, where the hell is my flying car?
According to the internet, Hall is an independent scientist and author, who has written extensively "on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and other social impacts of technology" (source). His expertise in these areas and fluency in so many more areas is clear, but what I love is the "independent" attitude: Hall's calling it like he sees it, even if it's going to ruffle feathers and go against the grain, similar to some of my other favourite authors Gary Taubes and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and in fact, quotes both of those authors at various points).
What I absolutely loved about this book was even though I did not agree with everything Hall was arguing for (details to follow), it was an absolute masterclass in building an extremely persuasive, engaging, and fun thesis.
Structurally, the arc of his argument was great, as Hall dives into different technological disciplines starting with aircraft design but continuing into nuclear power / cheap energy, nanotechnology, AI and more, and explores corresponding issues in government, regulation, industry, and academia, always coming back to "here's the impcat on flying cars" as an anchor point. The chapters start and end with quotes from different historical figures, scientists, science fiction authors, futurists, and futurist naysayers (e.g. people in the early 1900s saying it will take a million years before humans can engineer a flying machine).
As a taste of the dry humour Hall imparts, his book opens by reflecting on how shitty modern travel air experiences are:
In regards to private aircraft - the critical path to adopting flying cars - which were exploding in popularity from the post-WWII 1950s through the late 1970s, Hall argues that an increased focus on product liability in the 70s led to an explosion of lawyers, leading to an explosion of liability lawsuits, leading to the complete eradication of the private aircraft industry. He references a study claiming the US tort system consumes 2% of US GDP, on average, concluding:
On the practical impacts of regulation (recall this book was published in 2018) and the complexities that businesses and innovators have to navigate:
Case-in-point on regulations and private aircraft:
Hall turns his criticisms about the future (present) on the energy industry. We need limitless energy to support flying cars, after all, and what better option than nuclear energy? Unfortunately, Hall argues, nuclear crashed at the same time private airplanes did, for about the same reasons (the downfall started before Three Mile Island):
He even identifies a perfect counterexample clearly showing that regulation (to a lesser degree, public misinformation) is the biggest barrier in nuclear: the US Navy. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program lobbied (I think, in the 70s or 80s) for a single position of expertise and total accountability for the Navy's nuclear program, who could cut through all other regulations imposed on the rest of the US. the result:
Continuing on the energy thread, Hall makes a good point that the LACK of cheap, boundless, clean power means that as a society we spend a ridiculous amount of time optimizing and being efficient with our expensive, unsustainable sources of energy, and this costs us money ("we have forced everyone to pay more for energy-efficient cars, houses and appliances (more dollars, less value)"). This resonates with me as I see this in all industries. By chasing that 0.5% performance improvement, what step change opportunities are we ignoring? Hall doesn't mince words to aspiring technologists hunting for that next generation of clean, boundless power:
This review is getting long, and I think I've only got about halfway through Hall's arc, but I'm simultaneously running out of gas and probably not doing the book full justice, so I will get to some criticisms and wrap up.
As I said above, this book was a masterclass in crafting an argument and I enjoyed it for its own sake, but Hall is also pretty "out there" on some ideas. He is voicing a technologist's argument, that is, every problem we have can be solved by technology. Climate change? No problem, just fill the sky with nanorobots that adjust their angles to deflect or allow the appropriate amount of sunlight to the earth's surface. Humanity in total control of the temperature of the surface of the earth: what could possible go wrong? BTW, he mentions, isn't CO2 good for plants - what's the problem? BTW, he also mentions, controlling the weather could be a great way to change undesirable climates like Canada to desirable climates like California, or a great weapon to turn dissident states into cold, sunless wastelands. Sounds amazing.
And can we talk about flying cars again? In addition to his technologist/futurist perspective, Hall writes with what I'd call the US-centric automobile attitude, which is that the modern car is not only a gift from God himself, but an inalienable right. He criticizes the "war on cars" and rails against public transit as "worthless". In his view, the individual's ability to get from A to B in the shortest time possible trumps all other variables. What would a society entrenched in flying cars look like? Hall barely considers possible noise impacts, and completely omits any mention about what such a sky would look like. I'd prefer the future described in Happy City to the mile-high skyscrapers and floating cities surrounded by clouds of flying cars Hall envisions.
I discovered this book from this twitter thread and have to plug following @balajis for a fascinating futurist/technologist/bitcoin/media type dude. Also in that thread is linked a much better review with some of the critical charts replicated, so check that out for a better overview, and some of the data sources.
I would highly!!! recommend this book to futurists, sci-fi fans (sooo many sci-fi ideas explored in modern detail, and so many quotes from sci-fi authors to frame the arguments), engineers or technology people interested in flying cars, nuclear, or nanotech, or anyone interested in reading a really great, well-built, feather-ruffling argument.
In this self-published, Kindle-only book (just $4.12 CAD! Apparently it's $π USD) J. Storrs Hall digs deeply into the question of why we don't have flying cars, which is ostensibly the focus. However I think the back half of the title "A Memoir of Future Past" is actually the focus: why isn't the future (i.e., the present) as awesome as we thought it would be? Why don't we have cheap, near-infinite clean energy? Why are healthcare and education so expensive? And yes, where the hell is my flying car?
According to the internet, Hall is an independent scientist and author, who has written extensively "on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and other social impacts of technology" (source). His expertise in these areas and fluency in so many more areas is clear, but what I love is the "independent" attitude: Hall's calling it like he sees it, even if it's going to ruffle feathers and go against the grain, similar to some of my other favourite authors Gary Taubes and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and in fact, quotes both of those authors at various points).
What I absolutely loved about this book was even though I did not agree with everything Hall was arguing for (details to follow), it was an absolute masterclass in building an extremely persuasive, engaging, and fun thesis.
Structurally, the arc of his argument was great, as Hall dives into different technological disciplines starting with aircraft design but continuing into nuclear power / cheap energy, nanotechnology, AI and more, and explores corresponding issues in government, regulation, industry, and academia, always coming back to "here's the impcat on flying cars" as an anchor point. The chapters start and end with quotes from different historical figures, scientists, science fiction authors, futurists, and futurist naysayers (e.g. people in the early 1900s saying it will take a million years before humans can engineer a flying machine).
As a taste of the dry humour Hall imparts, his book opens by reflecting on how shitty modern travel air experiences are:
Once I got near SFO, I had to refuel my rental car, return it to store, and drag my luggage onto the “airtrain.” This is a piece of Disneyfied transport engineering that appears to combine all the disadvantages of buses, trains, and roller coasters in one vehicle.
In regards to private aircraft - the critical path to adopting flying cars - which were exploding in popularity from the post-WWII 1950s through the late 1970s, Hall argues that an increased focus on product liability in the 70s led to an explosion of lawyers, leading to an explosion of liability lawsuits, leading to the complete eradication of the private aircraft industry. He references a study claiming the US tort system consumes 2% of US GDP, on average, concluding:
the long-run compound-interest effect on the economy as a whole is startling: without it our economy today would be twice the size it actually is. This is the closest we can come to measuring the effect of taking more than a million of the country’s most talented and motivated people and put them to work making arguments and filing briefs, against each other so their efforts mostly cancel out, instead of inventing, developing, and manufacturing things which could have made life better.
On the practical impacts of regulation (recall this book was published in 2018) and the complexities that businesses and innovators have to navigate:
One of the main ill effects of regulation, at least in the United States, is a significant breakdown of the rule of law. Regulators are not elected and the regulations they promulgate are not subject to any significant check or balance. Last year Congress passed 138 laws; agencies published 2,926 new regulations. Federal courts handled about 95,000 cases; regulatory administrative courts a million. [...] Because of the all-encompassing breadth and specificity of the regulations and the clueless literality with which they are enforced, it is essentially impossible to run a productive business without breaking some of them.Later (I think in an Appendix), Hall shows a concrete example that kneecaps the flying car: detailed, unbendable regulations around side mirror requirements on passenger cars inhibit flying car development: side mirrors are super disruptive to aerodynamics. But regulators won't bend on accepting other options, like a camera-based system.
Case-in-point on regulations and private aircraft:
One of the more ironic regulatory pathologies that has shaped the world of general aviation is that most of the planes we fly are either 40 years old or homemade—and that we were forced into that position in the name of safety.
Hall turns his criticisms about the future (present) on the energy industry. We need limitless energy to support flying cars, after all, and what better option than nuclear energy? Unfortunately, Hall argues, nuclear crashed at the same time private airplanes did, for about the same reasons (the downfall started before Three Mile Island):
Nuclear power is probably the clearest case where regulation clobbered the learning curve. Innovation is strongly suppressed when you’re betting a few billion dollars on your ability to get a license to operate the plant. Besides the obvious cost increases due to direct imposition of rules, there was a major side effect of forcing the size of plants up (fewer licenses); fewer plants were built and fewer ideas tried. That also meant a greater cost for transmission (about half the total, according to my itemized bill), since plants are further from the average customer.
He even identifies a perfect counterexample clearly showing that regulation (to a lesser degree, public misinformation) is the biggest barrier in nuclear: the US Navy. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program lobbied (I think, in the 70s or 80s) for a single position of expertise and total accountability for the Navy's nuclear program, who could cut through all other regulations imposed on the rest of the US. the result:
The Navy has over 6000 reactor-years of accident-free operation. It has built 526 reactor cores (for comparison there are 99 civilian power reactors in the US), with 86 nuclear-powered vessels in current use.Wow!
Continuing on the energy thread, Hall makes a good point that the LACK of cheap, boundless, clean power means that as a society we spend a ridiculous amount of time optimizing and being efficient with our expensive, unsustainable sources of energy, and this costs us money ("we have forced everyone to pay more for energy-efficient cars, houses and appliances (more dollars, less value)"). This resonates with me as I see this in all industries. By chasing that 0.5% performance improvement, what step change opportunities are we ignoring? Hall doesn't mince words to aspiring technologists hunting for that next generation of clean, boundless power:
If you are a technologist working on some new, clean, abundant form of energy, I wish you all the luck in the world. But you must not labor under the illusion that should you succeed, your efforts will be justly rewarded by the gratitude of the people you have lifted from poverty and enabled to have a bright and growing future. You will be attacked, your work will be lied about by activists, demonized by ignorant journalists, and strangled by regulation. But only if it works.
This review is getting long, and I think I've only got about halfway through Hall's arc, but I'm simultaneously running out of gas and probably not doing the book full justice, so I will get to some criticisms and wrap up.
As I said above, this book was a masterclass in crafting an argument and I enjoyed it for its own sake, but Hall is also pretty "out there" on some ideas. He is voicing a technologist's argument, that is, every problem we have can be solved by technology. Climate change? No problem, just fill the sky with nanorobots that adjust their angles to deflect or allow the appropriate amount of sunlight to the earth's surface. Humanity in total control of the temperature of the surface of the earth: what could possible go wrong? BTW, he mentions, isn't CO2 good for plants - what's the problem? BTW, he also mentions, controlling the weather could be a great way to change undesirable climates like Canada to desirable climates like California, or a great weapon to turn dissident states into cold, sunless wastelands. Sounds amazing.
And can we talk about flying cars again? In addition to his technologist/futurist perspective, Hall writes with what I'd call the US-centric automobile attitude, which is that the modern car is not only a gift from God himself, but an inalienable right. He criticizes the "war on cars" and rails against public transit as "worthless". In his view, the individual's ability to get from A to B in the shortest time possible trumps all other variables. What would a society entrenched in flying cars look like? Hall barely considers possible noise impacts, and completely omits any mention about what such a sky would look like. I'd prefer the future described in Happy City to the mile-high skyscrapers and floating cities surrounded by clouds of flying cars Hall envisions.
I discovered this book from this twitter thread and have to plug following @balajis for a fascinating futurist/technologist/bitcoin/media type dude. Also in that thread is linked a much better review with some of the critical charts replicated, so check that out for a better overview, and some of the data sources.
I would highly!!! recommend this book to futurists, sci-fi fans (sooo many sci-fi ideas explored in modern detail, and so many quotes from sci-fi authors to frame the arguments), engineers or technology people interested in flying cars, nuclear, or nanotech, or anyone interested in reading a really great, well-built, feather-ruffling argument.
February 19, 2022
There's no other book quite like this. This is quickly emerging as a foundational text for the burgeoning cultural movement around progress studies.
Here, Dr. J. Storrs Hall explores why we don’t yet have flying cars and uses the answers he finds as launching off points for a broader discussion on the causes of The Great Stagnation that started in the late 1960s.
Broadly speaking this is a book about how the future could be even more glorious than what was envisioned in the 1960s, how we lost our way, and how we might get back on the path to a grander future. Storrs is a computer scientist by training but is well known for his work in the nanotechnology field. His command of important object-level considerations in multiple engineering disciplines is really impressive. Whether discussing nuclear powered rockets, nuclear batteries, molecular nanotechnology, or pros and cons of different flying car designs, Storrs analyses are firmly grounded in established physics and specific detailed engineering calculations. Storrs makes a compelling case that we would have had flying cars, energy too cheap to meter, supersonic flight, vacations on the moon, and material abundance if we had been bolder and hadn't regulated and litigated ourselves to death. Skeptical? Buy the book! Highly recommended!
Read my full review and notes on this book here:
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/...
Here, Dr. J. Storrs Hall explores why we don’t yet have flying cars and uses the answers he finds as launching off points for a broader discussion on the causes of The Great Stagnation that started in the late 1960s.
Broadly speaking this is a book about how the future could be even more glorious than what was envisioned in the 1960s, how we lost our way, and how we might get back on the path to a grander future. Storrs is a computer scientist by training but is well known for his work in the nanotechnology field. His command of important object-level considerations in multiple engineering disciplines is really impressive. Whether discussing nuclear powered rockets, nuclear batteries, molecular nanotechnology, or pros and cons of different flying car designs, Storrs analyses are firmly grounded in established physics and specific detailed engineering calculations. Storrs makes a compelling case that we would have had flying cars, energy too cheap to meter, supersonic flight, vacations on the moon, and material abundance if we had been bolder and hadn't regulated and litigated ourselves to death. Skeptical? Buy the book! Highly recommended!
Read my full review and notes on this book here:
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/...
November 14, 2024
‘Pessimism has always been intellectually fashionable.’
A great book overall: full of ideas, full of optimism, full of statistics to back both the ideas and the optimism.
The author’s bias towards an ardent need to increase energy consumption (and put humanity back on the ‘Henry Adams curve’) forces one to question modern day wisdom on topics like anthropogenic climate change and the impact of over-regulation in energy and aerospace sectors.
The book was a slow read because of the numerous high quality references, which only adds to the charm. The book flawlessly moves from nostalgia to anger to hope.
And while I may not agree with the author’s opinions on what flying cars and the ecosystem around them should/could be; I will cherish the opinions formed while reading this book for the remainder of my life, for it is much more than just about flying cars.
A great book overall: full of ideas, full of optimism, full of statistics to back both the ideas and the optimism.
The author’s bias towards an ardent need to increase energy consumption (and put humanity back on the ‘Henry Adams curve’) forces one to question modern day wisdom on topics like anthropogenic climate change and the impact of over-regulation in energy and aerospace sectors.
The book was a slow read because of the numerous high quality references, which only adds to the charm. The book flawlessly moves from nostalgia to anger to hope.
And while I may not agree with the author’s opinions on what flying cars and the ecosystem around them should/could be; I will cherish the opinions formed while reading this book for the remainder of my life, for it is much more than just about flying cars.
July 16, 2022
This book pivots dramatically between the literal and conceptual answers to the titular question ("Where is my flying car?") in a fun and jovial way that feels like an authentic representation of the author. At the micro level, it talks about things like piloting flying cars and whether the challenge of navigating in three dimensions would be too complex for the average driver, what the right shape of a flying car might be, and what happened with regulatory overreach leading towards a world where private flight stalled out.
At the macro level (more interesting to me), Hall was one of the first people to introduce me to the Henry Adams Curve - a 7% annual compounding in the amount of energy produced and consumed. That curve stopped in the late 20th century when we self-abnegated around nuclear energy and decided that we should focus on conservation rather than growth. Radically, he proposes measuring wealth in watts rather than dollars. This book turned me into a nuclear zealot: there may be other solutions, but nuclear is the most suitable for a society of builders and inventors, and it's the path we should pursue if we're serious about climate change. There's also a lot of random stuff about nanotech - not my area of research, but generally interesting!
Ultimately, the somewhat sad conclusion of the book is that we can have a flying car whenever we want - but we, as a society, don't really want it. We've become a society of lawyers rather than a society of tinkerers, and until we reclaim the desire to build (as represented by the New Industrialist ethos), we'll basically be in the same place in 40 years. Not having flying cars is a collective choice, not a problem of physics or engineering.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-n...
https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-...
At the macro level (more interesting to me), Hall was one of the first people to introduce me to the Henry Adams Curve - a 7% annual compounding in the amount of energy produced and consumed. That curve stopped in the late 20th century when we self-abnegated around nuclear energy and decided that we should focus on conservation rather than growth. Radically, he proposes measuring wealth in watts rather than dollars. This book turned me into a nuclear zealot: there may be other solutions, but nuclear is the most suitable for a society of builders and inventors, and it's the path we should pursue if we're serious about climate change. There's also a lot of random stuff about nanotech - not my area of research, but generally interesting!
Ultimately, the somewhat sad conclusion of the book is that we can have a flying car whenever we want - but we, as a society, don't really want it. We've become a society of lawyers rather than a society of tinkerers, and until we reclaim the desire to build (as represented by the New Industrialist ethos), we'll basically be in the same place in 40 years. Not having flying cars is a collective choice, not a problem of physics or engineering.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-n...
https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-...
October 12, 2022
2nd read (link to original review, but this one was the BEAUTIFUL hardcover edition by Stripe Press. I don't have many beautiful books, but this is one of them. The cover, the inside covers, the layout, the colouring of the illustrations (all gradients of teal and black like the cover) are all just fabulous. It's a rare treat to read a book you love in its top form!
Seriously, looking at all the other Stripe press books makes me just want to order all of them...
The book has been extensively updated since 2018 for this hardcover edition. In that time, it seems to me that Hall has honed his arguments, improved the structure and layout of the book, and just generally made everything better.
This is a book I'll love despite its faults: Hall is still an unabashed, unapologetic, very American car-brain. Since my first reading in Feb 2021, I've crushed every episode of the terrific War on Cars Podcast and bought an e-bike that I've put over a thousand kilometers on. Hall's an almost-unparalleled technological thinker and futurist, and I love his fascination with flying cars, but I don't think society would be that much better if everyone had a flying car. Call me simple but I love walking, being outside, and cycling. Still: I love this book and widely recommend it to anyone who I think can stomach an ultra-technical, ultra-geekly, and fascinating read.
Seriously, looking at all the other Stripe press books makes me just want to order all of them...
The book has been extensively updated since 2018 for this hardcover edition. In that time, it seems to me that Hall has honed his arguments, improved the structure and layout of the book, and just generally made everything better.
This is a book I'll love despite its faults: Hall is still an unabashed, unapologetic, very American car-brain. Since my first reading in Feb 2021, I've crushed every episode of the terrific War on Cars Podcast and bought an e-bike that I've put over a thousand kilometers on. Hall's an almost-unparalleled technological thinker and futurist, and I love his fascination with flying cars, but I don't think society would be that much better if everyone had a flying car. Call me simple but I love walking, being outside, and cycling. Still: I love this book and widely recommend it to anyone who I think can stomach an ultra-technical, ultra-geekly, and fascinating read.
January 5, 2025
I love the idea behind this book, and I also adore the analytical, scientific approach used to answer the titular question. The author doesn't try feeding readers with popular claims or common generalizations - no, "what if" is too much for him, so his instinctive reaction to yet another obstacle is simply to dive deep. That's the kind of book I truly enjoy - genuinely thought-provoking, forcing the reader to follow the chain of thought of the author.
Sadly, there is some sand thrown into the cogs of this "machine" - and no, the issue is not about the correctness of hypotheses or clarity of thought, but about how the book is written - the author's bookwriting skills. It may sound crazy, but I was both fascinated with the considerations and morbidly bored with the way they were presented. It was so tedious and monotonous that I was struggling to detect any sense of progression. It could have ended 5%, 10%, or 20% before the end, and I would not be surprised/disappointed - I was so tired of this book already at that point.
That, of course, doesn't mean that the book is not worth reading - quite the contrary, it's good to understand why certain predictions failed, but certain directions (of progress) have been abandoned, why the energy problem is such a crucial one, what is the real outcome of regulations & how did it change across the decades (btw. this part was the most controversial - there are some theses here I fully disagree), etc. I've also personally enjoyed all the references to Jetsons :) - I'm old enough to remember this cartoon (one of my favorites at some point ...).
It could have been a GREAT book, but even the greatest and perfectly research knowledge doesn't make a great book without sufficient writing skills ...
Sadly, there is some sand thrown into the cogs of this "machine" - and no, the issue is not about the correctness of hypotheses or clarity of thought, but about how the book is written - the author's bookwriting skills. It may sound crazy, but I was both fascinated with the considerations and morbidly bored with the way they were presented. It was so tedious and monotonous that I was struggling to detect any sense of progression. It could have ended 5%, 10%, or 20% before the end, and I would not be surprised/disappointed - I was so tired of this book already at that point.
That, of course, doesn't mean that the book is not worth reading - quite the contrary, it's good to understand why certain predictions failed, but certain directions (of progress) have been abandoned, why the energy problem is such a crucial one, what is the real outcome of regulations & how did it change across the decades (btw. this part was the most controversial - there are some theses here I fully disagree), etc. I've also personally enjoyed all the references to Jetsons :) - I'm old enough to remember this cartoon (one of my favorites at some point ...).
It could have been a GREAT book, but even the greatest and perfectly research knowledge doesn't make a great book without sufficient writing skills ...
December 27, 2021
Where Is My Flying Car? investigates what Tyler Cowen has called "The Great Stagnation," a strange period in the United States between roughly 1970 and the present where productivity has grown relatively slowly and few new innovations have transformed our lives save for advances in information technology. If we set computers aside, our planes in 2021 are somewhat slower than 1970, there have been few step change improvements in robotics, nuclear reactors are shutting down, and our space program can no longer send men to the moon. What happened to innovation in the world of atoms (versus bits)?
And more importantly, where are the flying cars we were surely supposed to have by now?
----------
During World War II, "any promising technical advance was seized upon and perfected, mass-produced, and put to violent use" [15] and consequently, in the postwar period the American public emerged optimistic about the potential for technology to have a real, positive impact on daily life. In the 1960s, futurists excitingly predicted that by the 2020s we would have many things we did develop like videophones, translation machines, contraception, and self-driving vehicles. But there were many things we didn't build like fusion energy, cyborgs, and cheap transportation at 1000 mph.
These futures were casualties of our Great Stagnation in the 1970s. Hall shows median wages stagnating in real terms, slowing transportation speeds, and our collective derailment from the Henry Adams curve -- a curve showing historical per capita energy consumption in the US compounding at about 2% per year. In one of Hall's better lines: "If you didn't know better, you would think the Department of Energy was established, on August 4, 1977, with the intent to prevent energy use" [33].
But what happened then? Why did we get computers but none of the hypersonic jets and Mars colonies?
It wasn't because of some fundamental blocker in R&D. I was surprised to hear that there was indeed a nascent flying car industry in the late 1950s that never took off, mired in regulatory morass [51-52]. Nanotech which could have delivered micro motors with absolutely stupid power density (1,000 horsepower in a square millimeter) was never seriously pursued, save for the tools available to us through biology -- far less precise ways to manipulate matter than what was envisioned [62-63]. Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Utah appeared to be making great forward progress on cold fusion around 1985, for their research program to only fade to obscurity and ridicule [67-68].
Hall pins the cause of our stasis on a combination of different issues:
(A) The Machiavelli Effect - a centralization of scientific funding in groups like NIH and NSF cartelized research and these institutions were captured by groups who didn't like to look stupid or lose the spotlight. Hall: "Failures of Nerve and Imagination, which are particular prevalent among bureaucrats, went from being merely the incorrect predictions of pundits to causing resource starvation and the activate suppression of progress" [88]
(B) Cultural Failure - as the saying goes, good times make weak men. The US's status as leading nuclear-armed superpower then sole hyperpower meant "it was no longer the case that a society that slid into inefficient cultural or governmental practices was likely to [promptly suffer a military defeat]" [94]. Shame and listlessness and distrust from Vietnam caused people to find meaning in things like obstruction and protests... which is a convenient way to *feel* like you are doing a good thing and making the world better, even if you are solving no fundamental problems. [97]
(C) Red Tape - this was not examined as directly as the other two, but goes part and parcel with each. Administrative agencies staffed with self-interested parties and spiritually bankrupt Woodstock hippies had no job except for slowing down progress.
Hall believes that if we want to have a future of flying cars, we as a society have to collectively decide we want these things more than we don't.
The final section paints a picture of a "Second Atomic Age" of abundant molten salt nuclear power, betavoltaic devices (nuclear batteries), nanomachines cable of arbitrarily arranging matter, personal space travel, and climate-controlling weather machines. We can have all these things! We just have to actually want to solve these problems and let scientists build instead of spending a trillion dollars each year on climate mitigation efforts that will do diddly-squat in comparison to Hall's proposed aerostat device [272] -- which isn't that crazy of an idea. Rather than making fun of the climate engineers, perhaps the climate change devotees could put on their listening ears and have the adults (i.e. scientists who aren't religious zealots) work out a real solution for humanity.
"Will we, as a society, pick a comfortable, static level of existence, requiring a modest amount of production that robots could easily supply? Or shall we put a flying car in ever garage, usher in the next Atomic Age, and inhert the stars?" [280]. Up to you (looking at administrative agencies, sneering journalists, and misguided nonprofits.)
----------
I'm not the first person to identify technological progressive versus technological conservative as a dividing line in society today. But increasingly I see these two groups forming: there are STEM optimists who like David Deutsch believe all problems are soluble with knowledge that we can obtain through science. Then there are the safetycrat pessimists who can only seem to regulate and prevent type 2 error -- but never actually reach towards a better tomorrow.
When I was an undergraduate at Yale, there were a lot of smart students who stayed away from physical chemistry and instead padded their GPA with political science and other waste of time courses. These are the same people today that work at law firms, nonprofits, and agencies, and because they can't truly solve climate change (e.g. developing fusion energy), simply say "no" to plastic straws, avoid blame, and stand athwart a higher living standard for all humanity... and feel great about their contribution in return.
We know when we are carrying water and when are not. Good for people with an elite education to look in the mirror from time to time.
And more importantly, where are the flying cars we were surely supposed to have by now?
----------
During World War II, "any promising technical advance was seized upon and perfected, mass-produced, and put to violent use" [15] and consequently, in the postwar period the American public emerged optimistic about the potential for technology to have a real, positive impact on daily life. In the 1960s, futurists excitingly predicted that by the 2020s we would have many things we did develop like videophones, translation machines, contraception, and self-driving vehicles. But there were many things we didn't build like fusion energy, cyborgs, and cheap transportation at 1000 mph.
These futures were casualties of our Great Stagnation in the 1970s. Hall shows median wages stagnating in real terms, slowing transportation speeds, and our collective derailment from the Henry Adams curve -- a curve showing historical per capita energy consumption in the US compounding at about 2% per year. In one of Hall's better lines: "If you didn't know better, you would think the Department of Energy was established, on August 4, 1977, with the intent to prevent energy use" [33].
But what happened then? Why did we get computers but none of the hypersonic jets and Mars colonies?
It wasn't because of some fundamental blocker in R&D. I was surprised to hear that there was indeed a nascent flying car industry in the late 1950s that never took off, mired in regulatory morass [51-52]. Nanotech which could have delivered micro motors with absolutely stupid power density (1,000 horsepower in a square millimeter) was never seriously pursued, save for the tools available to us through biology -- far less precise ways to manipulate matter than what was envisioned [62-63]. Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Utah appeared to be making great forward progress on cold fusion around 1985, for their research program to only fade to obscurity and ridicule [67-68].
Hall pins the cause of our stasis on a combination of different issues:
(A) The Machiavelli Effect - a centralization of scientific funding in groups like NIH and NSF cartelized research and these institutions were captured by groups who didn't like to look stupid or lose the spotlight. Hall: "Failures of Nerve and Imagination, which are particular prevalent among bureaucrats, went from being merely the incorrect predictions of pundits to causing resource starvation and the activate suppression of progress" [88]
(B) Cultural Failure - as the saying goes, good times make weak men. The US's status as leading nuclear-armed superpower then sole hyperpower meant "it was no longer the case that a society that slid into inefficient cultural or governmental practices was likely to [promptly suffer a military defeat]" [94]. Shame and listlessness and distrust from Vietnam caused people to find meaning in things like obstruction and protests... which is a convenient way to *feel* like you are doing a good thing and making the world better, even if you are solving no fundamental problems. [97]
(C) Red Tape - this was not examined as directly as the other two, but goes part and parcel with each. Administrative agencies staffed with self-interested parties and spiritually bankrupt Woodstock hippies had no job except for slowing down progress.
Hall believes that if we want to have a future of flying cars, we as a society have to collectively decide we want these things more than we don't.
The final section paints a picture of a "Second Atomic Age" of abundant molten salt nuclear power, betavoltaic devices (nuclear batteries), nanomachines cable of arbitrarily arranging matter, personal space travel, and climate-controlling weather machines. We can have all these things! We just have to actually want to solve these problems and let scientists build instead of spending a trillion dollars each year on climate mitigation efforts that will do diddly-squat in comparison to Hall's proposed aerostat device [272] -- which isn't that crazy of an idea. Rather than making fun of the climate engineers, perhaps the climate change devotees could put on their listening ears and have the adults (i.e. scientists who aren't religious zealots) work out a real solution for humanity.
"Will we, as a society, pick a comfortable, static level of existence, requiring a modest amount of production that robots could easily supply? Or shall we put a flying car in ever garage, usher in the next Atomic Age, and inhert the stars?" [280]. Up to you (looking at administrative agencies, sneering journalists, and misguided nonprofits.)
----------
I'm not the first person to identify technological progressive versus technological conservative as a dividing line in society today. But increasingly I see these two groups forming: there are STEM optimists who like David Deutsch believe all problems are soluble with knowledge that we can obtain through science. Then there are the safetycrat pessimists who can only seem to regulate and prevent type 2 error -- but never actually reach towards a better tomorrow.
When I was an undergraduate at Yale, there were a lot of smart students who stayed away from physical chemistry and instead padded their GPA with political science and other waste of time courses. These are the same people today that work at law firms, nonprofits, and agencies, and because they can't truly solve climate change (e.g. developing fusion energy), simply say "no" to plastic straws, avoid blame, and stand athwart a higher living standard for all humanity... and feel great about their contribution in return.
We know when we are carrying water and when are not. Good for people with an elite education to look in the mirror from time to time.
December 22, 2021
EDIT 2021-12-22:
Well, I finally got around to finishing this book, and it's actually fantastic if you can slog through it. This is the first book I've seen in a long time that has any coherent view of what the future should be, that isn't just that our phones will get faster and our cameras will have more megapixels. It's inspiring as hell, though not without flaws.
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Started off great, but it meanders aggressively and was unable to maintain the author's or my attention. His claim is that the technology exists for flying cars today, but the political wherewithal for them hasn't kept up. Regulations and environmentalism have gotten in the way. This corresponds well to my priors, but he downplays environmentalism more than I think is deserved; when I dug into his citations they were of poor quality, which unfortunately makes me shift away from the bit of his premise that I agree with. 2/5 due to abandonment.
Well, I finally got around to finishing this book, and it's actually fantastic if you can slog through it. This is the first book I've seen in a long time that has any coherent view of what the future should be, that isn't just that our phones will get faster and our cameras will have more megapixels. It's inspiring as hell, though not without flaws.
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Started off great, but it meanders aggressively and was unable to maintain the author's or my attention. His claim is that the technology exists for flying cars today, but the political wherewithal for them hasn't kept up. Regulations and environmentalism have gotten in the way. This corresponds well to my priors, but he downplays environmentalism more than I think is deserved; when I dug into his citations they were of poor quality, which unfortunately makes me shift away from the bit of his premise that I agree with. 2/5 due to abandonment.
January 6, 2022
This was gifted to me. I found it really dry. With long sentences, that were a chore to parse. The best section of it contrasted the Jetsons with the average family of its broadcast day.
February 23, 2023
I’m really torn on this book - the explanations of the real scientific basis for some of our favorite “Sci-fi” technologies and how they could actually be made today was fascinating and really well done.
The explanation for why we don’t have that technology? Incredibly poorly written an justified. The author’s basic thesis is that the problem is regulation and environmentalists interfering in the free marketplace of ideas. I just don’t understand how someone can look at the world today and come to the conclusion that “the problem with modern society is that we have too many regulations and cars too much about the environment.”
The explanation for why we don’t have that technology? Incredibly poorly written an justified. The author’s basic thesis is that the problem is regulation and environmentalists interfering in the free marketplace of ideas. I just don’t understand how someone can look at the world today and come to the conclusion that “the problem with modern society is that we have too many regulations and cars too much about the environment.”
November 13, 2020
At times rambling but fascinating. Speculating yet mostly truthful or at least with solid math. Not everything written here should be taken at face value. While reading own research and fact-checking is recommended.
I would consider this an antidote to Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment Not a perfect book, but sufficiently well argumented one. For example Hall reversed the Jevons Paradox for me. Paradox being in the fact that if something (like a car engine) becomes more energy efficient then the energy source (here petrol) will be used just as much as before and then some - meaning people will drive more and use more fuel than with the previous less efficient engine. In Techno-Fix this was considered a sign (one of several) that we cannot control, plan or predict the effect of our technology and energy use. For Hall its wonderful - it means people are getting more value out of the new engine than the older one.
Hall also hates green environmentalists. A lot. And bureaucracy. A lot. This was on the verge of off-putting but one must always be reminded of the dysfunction of American Federal Government compared with... well the rest of the developed world. I've worked for the public sector of my country and have used public services a lot with little complaint (but not zero complaint). We'we actually had a lot of public sector innovation in Estonia. For someone more interested in the US public sector 2nd book of Francis Fukuyama Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy is recommended. Something did truly happen in the 70s and we are still living through the consequences. Changes in the quality of public administration, growing awareness about questions regarding conservation, climate change and energy efficiency. The points concerning energy are the most important for me - not the possible technologies or even the flying car. More energy use means a more wealthier economy and it is a truism few understand sufficiently.
I'm not a libertanian and I have no problem with environmental protection or the skepticism of the public for things of unknown effect in their backyards (like an idea to build a flying car in a garage by the neighborhood mechanist). Yes the arguments for a cleaner environment and less CO2 producing economy are sometimes exaggeration but so are the arguments to defend this or that business in time of great economic upheaval - public discourse needs simplification on the verge of lying, sadly many people do not dig deeply enough to verify the facts or start to believe their own simplifications. Also on a reverse note the intergovernmental climate panel Halls relies on is actually more likely too conservative in its estimates because for the final policy brief part of the document - all member states have a say in all the wording which means it is ridiculously soft. There is also (quite humorous and angry) criticism of the economic analysis of climate change effects by Steve Keen (The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change).
Also it is unlikely that the author of the book would enjoy living in current Chinese or Russian cities where clean air is hard to come by. I also really don't like the car-centric worldview (flying car or not) - I like a walkable city but I understand we can and should not force one mode of transport for everyone.
Final thoughts were mixed. One of the odd one is that somebody should write something like this for Europe or at least for a mayor country or region in Europe. People decry about Brussels regulation but in general life here seems better than in America (and I'm living in what used to be part of the Soviet Block). I am not that worried about the lack of flying cars but I find the technology fascinating and worth tinkering and experimenting. Are we in Europe doomed as well to stagnate and for the same reasons or is our stagnation different or is it US-specific? Time will tell.
EDIT: I also did a review (with different points) in Estonian: sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c9-sotsiaalia/mik...
I would consider this an antidote to Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment Not a perfect book, but sufficiently well argumented one. For example Hall reversed the Jevons Paradox for me. Paradox being in the fact that if something (like a car engine) becomes more energy efficient then the energy source (here petrol) will be used just as much as before and then some - meaning people will drive more and use more fuel than with the previous less efficient engine. In Techno-Fix this was considered a sign (one of several) that we cannot control, plan or predict the effect of our technology and energy use. For Hall its wonderful - it means people are getting more value out of the new engine than the older one.
Hall also hates green environmentalists. A lot. And bureaucracy. A lot. This was on the verge of off-putting but one must always be reminded of the dysfunction of American Federal Government compared with... well the rest of the developed world. I've worked for the public sector of my country and have used public services a lot with little complaint (but not zero complaint). We'we actually had a lot of public sector innovation in Estonia. For someone more interested in the US public sector 2nd book of Francis Fukuyama Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy is recommended. Something did truly happen in the 70s and we are still living through the consequences. Changes in the quality of public administration, growing awareness about questions regarding conservation, climate change and energy efficiency. The points concerning energy are the most important for me - not the possible technologies or even the flying car. More energy use means a more wealthier economy and it is a truism few understand sufficiently.
I'm not a libertanian and I have no problem with environmental protection or the skepticism of the public for things of unknown effect in their backyards (like an idea to build a flying car in a garage by the neighborhood mechanist). Yes the arguments for a cleaner environment and less CO2 producing economy are sometimes exaggeration but so are the arguments to defend this or that business in time of great economic upheaval - public discourse needs simplification on the verge of lying, sadly many people do not dig deeply enough to verify the facts or start to believe their own simplifications. Also on a reverse note the intergovernmental climate panel Halls relies on is actually more likely too conservative in its estimates because for the final policy brief part of the document - all member states have a say in all the wording which means it is ridiculously soft. There is also (quite humorous and angry) criticism of the economic analysis of climate change effects by Steve Keen (The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change).
Also it is unlikely that the author of the book would enjoy living in current Chinese or Russian cities where clean air is hard to come by. I also really don't like the car-centric worldview (flying car or not) - I like a walkable city but I understand we can and should not force one mode of transport for everyone.
Final thoughts were mixed. One of the odd one is that somebody should write something like this for Europe or at least for a mayor country or region in Europe. People decry about Brussels regulation but in general life here seems better than in America (and I'm living in what used to be part of the Soviet Block). I am not that worried about the lack of flying cars but I find the technology fascinating and worth tinkering and experimenting. Are we in Europe doomed as well to stagnate and for the same reasons or is our stagnation different or is it US-specific? Time will tell.
EDIT: I also did a review (with different points) in Estonian: sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c9-sotsiaalia/mik...
September 14, 2020
This book is basically about what the world could look like if the technological progress from the late 1800s through the 1950s or so continued to today. It has more interesting ideas per page than any other book I can remember reading, and much of it seems technically feasible and worth pursuing. Hall's history of VTOL aircraft development was fascinating, and despite knowing quite a bit about VTOLs already, he covered a lot of developments that were unfamiliar to me.
I'm familiar with Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation hypothesis and pretty much agreed with it before reading this book. While I think Cowen's idea that most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked is largely true, Hall convinced me that there are major technological developments within our reach that haven't yet happened due to excessive regulation and our inability to generate enough power to make them work.
So why am I only giving this book 4 stars? In many cases Hall is either too naive, too optimistic, or both. Some of his claims about regulation are just crazy. For example, he claims that without regulation the average income in the US would be 130k higher than it is currently. This seems obviously false, as even if regulation is the current bottleneck to wage growth, a new one will surely pop up once regulation is solved. And it ignores that some (by no means all) of the existing regulations are useful and avoid tragedy of the commons type problems. There are many similar cases throughout the book where he makes exaggerated claims that can be falsified with just a moment's thought.
Perhaps my biggest gripe is how nanotechnology is his solution to everything. Repeatedly, when a seemingly impossible problem arises, he just says "don't worry, nanotechnology will solve it". Of course, he never defines what nanotechnology is, or how it can be developed. He pretends like he does, by referencing a talk Feynman gave in the 60s, but that deals with miniaturization of macroscale objects. Somehow, he jumps from micromachining to claiming we have a way to create atomically precise structures literally from thin-air, but provides no explanation of why these two things are related or why progress in one should allow us to make progress on the other. His citing Drexler suggests to me he doesn't understand the science very well, since Drexler is a known charlatan who hasn't achieved anything tangible and his theories ignore intermolecular effects that we know would be important at the scale he wants to work at. Similarly, his constant allusion to diamond structures ignores the actual material properties of diamond. Yes, diamond is strong and hard, but it will also shatter along imperfections. Not a good structural material because of this devastating failure mode.
Overall, great book. Probably the most thought provoking thing you'll read this year, but be skeptical anytime he starts talking about nanotechnology, and remember that he lives in engineer-world where every problem has a technical solution.
I'm familiar with Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation hypothesis and pretty much agreed with it before reading this book. While I think Cowen's idea that most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked is largely true, Hall convinced me that there are major technological developments within our reach that haven't yet happened due to excessive regulation and our inability to generate enough power to make them work.
So why am I only giving this book 4 stars? In many cases Hall is either too naive, too optimistic, or both. Some of his claims about regulation are just crazy. For example, he claims that without regulation the average income in the US would be 130k higher than it is currently. This seems obviously false, as even if regulation is the current bottleneck to wage growth, a new one will surely pop up once regulation is solved. And it ignores that some (by no means all) of the existing regulations are useful and avoid tragedy of the commons type problems. There are many similar cases throughout the book where he makes exaggerated claims that can be falsified with just a moment's thought.
Perhaps my biggest gripe is how nanotechnology is his solution to everything. Repeatedly, when a seemingly impossible problem arises, he just says "don't worry, nanotechnology will solve it". Of course, he never defines what nanotechnology is, or how it can be developed. He pretends like he does, by referencing a talk Feynman gave in the 60s, but that deals with miniaturization of macroscale objects. Somehow, he jumps from micromachining to claiming we have a way to create atomically precise structures literally from thin-air, but provides no explanation of why these two things are related or why progress in one should allow us to make progress on the other. His citing Drexler suggests to me he doesn't understand the science very well, since Drexler is a known charlatan who hasn't achieved anything tangible and his theories ignore intermolecular effects that we know would be important at the scale he wants to work at. Similarly, his constant allusion to diamond structures ignores the actual material properties of diamond. Yes, diamond is strong and hard, but it will also shatter along imperfections. Not a good structural material because of this devastating failure mode.
Overall, great book. Probably the most thought provoking thing you'll read this year, but be skeptical anytime he starts talking about nanotechnology, and remember that he lives in engineer-world where every problem has a technical solution.
April 3, 2022
I thought this book was going to be a discussion about why technology and innovation has stagnated in the last half century, and what we can do to fix it.
However, the book covers this topic almost in passing, offering pretty simplistic (though totally fair) assessments of why the stagnation occurred.
Instead, a very sizable portion of this book is dedicated to the literal discussion of "Where is my flying car?" From the size and efficiency of electric battery's, to engine horsepower and weight, to the science of lift and flying, to airplane and helicopter history; You get a very literal, and very thorough discussion about why you dont have a flying car...
This book was definitely not what I expected going in, and I wish it would have spent more time on why there has been stagnation and offered better solutions on how to overcome it. However, I still found it pretty interesting overall. I enjoyed learning about possible technologies that could be developed in the future. Mainly, nano technology and thorium based fission are topics that I want to learn more about in the future.
However, the book covers this topic almost in passing, offering pretty simplistic (though totally fair) assessments of why the stagnation occurred.
Instead, a very sizable portion of this book is dedicated to the literal discussion of "Where is my flying car?" From the size and efficiency of electric battery's, to engine horsepower and weight, to the science of lift and flying, to airplane and helicopter history; You get a very literal, and very thorough discussion about why you dont have a flying car...
This book was definitely not what I expected going in, and I wish it would have spent more time on why there has been stagnation and offered better solutions on how to overcome it. However, I still found it pretty interesting overall. I enjoyed learning about possible technologies that could be developed in the future. Mainly, nano technology and thorium based fission are topics that I want to learn more about in the future.
August 1, 2022
Роскошная книга про состояние технологий и науки. Начинается с забавного - «где моя моя летающая машина?» и погружается в важнейшие вопросы прошлого, текущего и будущего технологического развития. Очень рекомендую
December 19, 2024
robots, space travel, ray guns, mechanical educators, weather control, universal libraries, rejuvenation, scientific world government, or limitless atomic power
Fifty years ago it was clear that flying cars were in our future. Or at least it was clear to any 10-year-old boy who read the stories of Tom Swift, Jr. His “triphibian atomicar” was held in the air by “repellatron rays” and powered by an “atomic capsule” which could “change atomic energy directly into electricity.”
For 1925, Google N-grams counts essentially the same number of mentions for the Wright brothers, Babe Ruth, and Thomas Edison.
The wartime years saw the invention or major development of jets, radar, helicopters, antibiotics, DDT, portable radios, and computers.
in the 50s and 60s can be seen clearly in a review of two books, Your World Tomorrow and Miracles Ahead: Better Living in the Postwar World
From the two books in the review, we have: High-octane gasoline Factory-built housing Portable radios Televisions with screens “the size of a pocket-handkerchief” Air conditioning Plastics! and a vast increase in synthetic foods and materials Electronic controls for cooking Fluorescent lights Giant airliners and worldwide vacations
electricity too cheap to meter
As communications improve, until all the senses—and not merely vision and hearing—can be projected anywhere on the face of the Earth, men will have less and less incentive to travel. Telecommunication and transportation are opposing forces.
Life in 1913 was simply much harder for most Americans. up to 60 hours per week in manufacturing, for example, and even more in agriculture.
refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves, and washing machines were not in general use, which should not be terribly surprising since most urban households, and virtually all rural households, were not yet wired for electricity.
in 1913 Henry Ford was just beginning the mass production of the Model T automobile, railroads were powered by steam, and regular commercial air travel was quite a few years away. Importantly, life expectancy at birth in 1913 was only 53 years
even adjusted for inflation. Housing costs twice as much, on average. Primary education costs three times as much as in the 60s, and children are not learning more.
Medical care now costs six times as much as in the 60s: in 1960, the average worker worked ten days to pay for his health insurance; today, 60 days.
An easy rule of thumb for translating 1960s dollars to current-day ones is to multiply by 10.
it’s 3 times as expensive to fly just above Mach 1 as just below it. The Concorde SST was heavily subsidized as a national prestige project by Great Britain and France
In 1973, the FAA banned civilian supersonic flight over the United States. The ostensible reason was noise
No wonder Feynman found himself impressed. In Nanofuture, I described Drexler’s vision: Engines of Creation is a technophile’s dreamscape. It predicts microscopic replicating units able to build skyscraper sized objects to atomic precision. These could be buildings or they could be spaceships. It discusses artificial intelligence and engineering systems able to handle the enormous complexity such designs would require. It speaks of “easy and convenient” space travel, and describes a spacesuit so light and thin that you almost forget you’re wearing it (present-day spacesuits are very awkward and arduous to wear and work in). It mentions cell repair machines and curing “a disease called aging.” It talks about cryonics and resurrecting the frozen.
Feynman had only talked about recording the Britannica on a pinhead
Earth intercepts ~ 10¹⁷ watts of solar radiation.
a factory that can make 20,000 widgets a week is obviously worth two factories which can only make 10,000.
Moore’s Law is equivalent to a 60% growth curve. in a year and a half.
Medieval stained glass windows are an example of how nanotechnology was used in the pre-modern era.
Google Scholar lists no references to Feynman’s Plenty of Room, which had been published in a Caltech magazine in 1960
Richard Feynman asked, “What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?”
I call it the Machiavelli Effect; protecting their own turf.
major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.
The United States did catch up, with our GDP per capita exceeding Britain’s by the 20th century
OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!
increasing understanding of the workings of the molecular machines inside the cell, but capturing this as a mechanical technology was still outside the envelope
Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke listed two major forms of failure. Failure of Nerve and the Failure of the Imagination.
The Failure of Nerve applies when the facts are known—the science is there, the engineering understood, the pathway clear, and only the details remain to be worked out. But if the result is so far out of commonsense experience, it is all too easy to grasp for spurious reasons that it might be impossible. The classic case of this, of course, was the near-unanimous insistence of the scientific community that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible, a position that scientists continued to maintain for about five years after the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903.
The Failure of Imagination is, on the other hand, easier to understand and harder to prevent. It is essentially the same as Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns:” where the thing that is making your prediction wrong simply isn’t part of the toolkit of knowledge that you have available. An exemplary case of this was Rutherford’s insistence on the impossibility of nuclear power. He was the leading nuclear physicist of his day; indeed, he was the discoverer of the atomic nucleus. Yet he spoke before the discovery of the neutron and of nuclear fission.
According to Nature, scientific publishing has a growth rate of about 8%, for a doubling time of 9 years.
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, and they were, on that day, extremely lucky men. They thought they were lucky because they had managed to obtain the fusion of deuterium into helium in an electrochemical beaker. They had something that mainstream nuclear engineers could only dream of: a way to convert all the potential energy of deuterium to heat in a ridiculously simple and inexpensive apparatus.
Pg 112: Trace from a F&P cold fusion experiment from 1985-88: a calorimeter would run for two months producing the same power out as in, then for no apparent reason produce more than ten times as much out for a few days, then just as inexplicably quit.
Massive heat releases were rare; it was much more common for nothing at all to happen. Fleischmann was arguably the second foremost physical electrochemist in the world at that point. Steve Jones, a nuclear physicist at nearby Brigham Young University, for which he had coined the term “cold fusion”.
crackpots (and they are endless) come in with “limitless free energy” schemes that spring from the total ignorance of all the basic tenets of physics (such as conservation of mass/energy)
Lewis Strauss and “power too cheap to meter.”
nuclear energy, fission or fusion, is the same as the bottom line with “renewables:” for all practical purposes, the fuel is free and the cost of the delivered power is entirely capital cost.
Nanotech was Failure of Nerve; cold fusion is Failure of the Imagination
Aerocar was useful. Unlike simply owning an airplane, when you bought one you had a car. When you flew somewhere in one, you had a car when you got there.
Neutrality Act
I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated. If you are starting a computer-software company, that costs maybe $100,000. But to get a new drug through the FDA, maybe on the order of a billion dollars or so. —Peter Thiel
Everyone knows how to obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know how to “obey” laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (810 pages), the Affordable Care Act (1,024 pages) or Dodd-Frank (2,300 pages). —Charles Murray
If you want to start an automobile company in this country you need a handful of engineers—and at least 1000 lawyers. —Arnold Kling
Today, the federal regulatory code is over 175,000 pages long.
we don’t intuitively understand exponential growth.
Pg 143: the number of lawyers exploded in the 1970s due essentially entirely to the explosion of product liability lawsuits.
From Wells to E. E. “Doc” Smith to Asimov and Heinlein and van Vogt
you can make someone, including yourself, believe, using emotion instead of evidence. It is widely unappreciated just how much we are evolved to decieve ourselves.
Stephen King is an enormously best-selling author; statistics analysis website FiveThirtyEight tells us that horror movies are reliably the best investment in Hollywood.
It simply is not a falsifiable statement.
“Ergophobia” technically means a neurotic fear of doing work, in an individual.
anti-nuclear weapons movement that morphed into the anti-nuclear power movement.
Federal Energy Policy Act of 1992 mandates that “all faucet fixtures manufactured in the United States restrict maximum water flow at or below 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) at 80 pounds per square inch (psi) of water pressure or 2.2 gpm at 60 psi.”
Young men spending their time indoors playing video games, instead of outdoors playing with flying machines.
Many of the classic science fiction writers depict civilizations which rise and fall, as real ones have done throughout history. Asimov’s Foundation and Piper’s Terro-Human histories are based on historical cycles at the scale of the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of modern western civilization.
Heinlein’s prediction still stands out. he predicted a hiatus in space travel after what he calls a “False Dawn.” The Hiatus lasts for most of the twenty-first century, and is characterized by the “New Crusade,” a religious dictatorship which suppresses scientific research and technological advancement.
In today’s America, you can’t be trusted to ride on an airliner with a nail file. In the 50s, to go on a hunting trip you simply walked on to the plane with your rifle and put it in the overhead rack.
when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a Utopian romance set in the year 2000. The plot is as follows: Julian West is mesmerized to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000, when everything is wonderful. Occasionally he gets out and looks at some wonderful thing or another, but mostly he just sits and people lecture him about how wonderful things are. The reason things are wonderful is that the US has abolished money and private enterprise— essentially gone completely communist. People are not only much richer, but physically more well-formed and vigorous; greed and envy are unheardof; people are more honest; they care more for each other; violence is unknown. Nations don’t even make war on each other.
In the 19-Aughts, the average worker produced about 5 cars per year; by the Twenties, he produced 20. It was that factor-of-four productivity jump, spearheaded by Henry Ford and the assembly line
Hans Rosling classifies the wealthiness of the world’s population into four levels:
1. Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1.
2. Bicycle (and shoes). The $4 per day they make doesn’t sound like much to you and me but it is a huge step up from Level 1. There are three billion people at level 2.
3. The two billion people at Level 3 make $16 a day; a motorbike is within their reach.
4. At $64 per day, the one billion people at Level 4 own a car.
The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is.
The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000.
average speed on a bicycle is 9 mph. A sample survey using Google Maps indicates that transit typically takes something like three times as long as a car would.
the wartime way of thinking—(they sent fliers out with as little as one hour of training in the aircraft they were flying). The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents.
the pilot is doing four jobs at once: engineer for the motor and other mechanical systems of the plane; aviating it as just described; navigator; and radio operator. Each one of these alone is not a really hard job, but doing all four at once. the main thing different between a plane and a car is the danger of going slow, particularly when you are low and trying to land.
There are now fully autonomous aircraft which can do the entire job by themselves; you need only tell them where to go.
A wing like this can have a theoretical lift-to-drag ratio of over 100. Lift coefficient rises from 0.4 to 1.0, meaning you get two and a half times the lift. A well-designed glider can go 50 feet forward for each 1foot drop in altitude. Lift is proportional to the square of the speed and, within certain limits, to the angle of attack. The thing that makes piloting an art and a skill is that the angle of attack relationship fails at an angle somewhere between 15 and 20 degrees. Instead of increasing lift, further tilt causes it to disappear, a phenomenon known as stall.
As my flight instructor told me: “To go up, pull back on the yoke [which increases your angle of attack]. To go down fast, pull back some more.”
loading passengers and cargo into the plane is like loading a rowboat: you have to pay attention to where the center of gravity is, and in particular to the total weight. If the gunwales are awash, don’t lean out over the side! The closer to the max load you are, the more nearly you must be perfectly balanced.
Who needs a runway? A Robinson R44 in New Zealand, which has more helicopters per capita than any other country. Instead of thousands of feet of runway, 50 to 100 feet wide, the helicopter only needs a 10 by 10 foot pad. Virtually every hospital has a heliport.
Today, new helicopters are in the $1 to $10 million range, and used ones can be had for $100 thousand to $1 million. This is similar to the range for private jets
Suppose you are a farmer who sells tomatoes. You have a truck that gets 10 miles to the gallon. A gallon of gas costs, say, $5. If you deliver a truckload of tomatoes to a market 10 miles away, the round trip costs you $10. Let us further suppose that that is as much as you can spend on gas and break even on your tomatoes. You can sell tomatoes to anyone less than ten miles away but not to anyone further. Now suppose a truck becomes available that gets 20 miles to the gallon. You can now afford to deliver tomatoes up to 20 miles away for the same amount of gas. But notice: a circle with a 20-mile radius has four times the area of one with a 10-mile radius. All other things being equal, you have four times as many viable customers with the new truck.
Recovery of fossil fuels is by no means the only source of abundant energy that technology can open up to us. Oil isn’t free energy handed down from heaven.
Average price of a year’s energy, in chemical fuels: $6,553. In nuclear, $5.80. You can now understand why, at the dawn of the Atomic Age, some people reasonably imagined electricity might be “too cheap to meter.”
a one-inch cube of uranium, contains more energy than the average American uses in a lifetime. Uranium provides 80 TJ of energy per kilogram. Gasoline provides 0.000 047 TJ per kilogram
Isaac Asimov’s speculation—The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course—was completely reasonable
We really, really should have had atomic batteries by now. And guess what? Your iPhone would never need charging, and your Tesla would have a range of 3.5 million miles. It is a possibility.
One of the reasons that computers improved so rapidly in price/ performance over the past half-century is that the physics of computation don’t present the kind of “glass ceiling” that supersonic flight does for airplanes. (Another of course is that computers were essentially unregulated.)
Nixon banished a reactor that was virtually meltdown-proof. Thorium is three to four times as common as uranium, and doesn’t need the separate enrichment step—and the reactor could burn virtually all of it, rather than less than one percent. Proven reserves of uranium could power the globe for 77 years; of thorium for 6472 years.
If the reactor or generator fails, the plug melts, and the fuel flows into a sump where it’s too spread out to maintain a reaction.
uranium is too cheap already. All the cost is in regulatory compliance, and that would increase, rather than decrease
The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1946 was won by Hermann J. Muller for the demonstration that ionizing radiation caused genetic mutations, in his particular case using X-rays on fruit flies. doses above 400 rads, an exposure that today would be called 4000
4000 mGy is a huge dose; in fact, 50% of humans die from it if received in a short period. A typical CT scan, for comparison, is 10 mGy. The linear no-threshold (“LNT”) hypothesis has never been rigorously tested, and yet it seems to have become received wisdom in the radiophobic culture of the regulators.
they then proceed to point out that that level is 100 times greater than they allow for public radiation exposure. This is like setting a speed limit of 1 MPH because people have been injured doing 100. You can imagine what regulations made on the basis of this kind of thinking did to the cost of a nuclear power plant.
Yes, nuclear today is expensive. Shipping would be expensive too if trucks had to operate with a speed limit of 1 MPH.
itemized bill
We could have had flying cars in 1940, but for WWII. We could have started on nanotech in 1960. We could have started on solar power satellites in the 70s.
Counting watts is a better way to measure a people’s standard of living than counting dollars. dollars per kWh generated in the US has increased by 300% while actual power generated has increased by only 26% (more dollars, less value); Yes, we’re spending more dollars but (outside of computing and communication) most of what we’re getting for them is virtue signaling.
technically interested people (i.e. nerds)
Coal, which liberated mankind from the Malthusian trap, gave us manufacturing, railroads, and steamships, more than doubled our life expectancy, and saved almost all of us from having to be dirt farmers. Oil, which substantially replaced coal in the twentieth century, made airplanes and the private automobile possible along with the rest of the modern world.
The leading advantage is power to weight ratio
precision much, much higher than your hand motions can actually achieve.
ideas are evolutionarily selected for intuitive appeal rather than for objective truth.
Mobility gives you good climate all year round (just follow it)
Pg 430
Fifty years ago it was clear that flying cars were in our future. Or at least it was clear to any 10-year-old boy who read the stories of Tom Swift, Jr. His “triphibian atomicar” was held in the air by “repellatron rays” and powered by an “atomic capsule” which could “change atomic energy directly into electricity.”
For 1925, Google N-grams counts essentially the same number of mentions for the Wright brothers, Babe Ruth, and Thomas Edison.
The wartime years saw the invention or major development of jets, radar, helicopters, antibiotics, DDT, portable radios, and computers.
in the 50s and 60s can be seen clearly in a review of two books, Your World Tomorrow and Miracles Ahead: Better Living in the Postwar World
From the two books in the review, we have: High-octane gasoline Factory-built housing Portable radios Televisions with screens “the size of a pocket-handkerchief” Air conditioning Plastics! and a vast increase in synthetic foods and materials Electronic controls for cooking Fluorescent lights Giant airliners and worldwide vacations
electricity too cheap to meter
As communications improve, until all the senses—and not merely vision and hearing—can be projected anywhere on the face of the Earth, men will have less and less incentive to travel. Telecommunication and transportation are opposing forces.
Life in 1913 was simply much harder for most Americans. up to 60 hours per week in manufacturing, for example, and even more in agriculture.
refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves, and washing machines were not in general use, which should not be terribly surprising since most urban households, and virtually all rural households, were not yet wired for electricity.
in 1913 Henry Ford was just beginning the mass production of the Model T automobile, railroads were powered by steam, and regular commercial air travel was quite a few years away. Importantly, life expectancy at birth in 1913 was only 53 years
even adjusted for inflation. Housing costs twice as much, on average. Primary education costs three times as much as in the 60s, and children are not learning more.
Medical care now costs six times as much as in the 60s: in 1960, the average worker worked ten days to pay for his health insurance; today, 60 days.
An easy rule of thumb for translating 1960s dollars to current-day ones is to multiply by 10.
it’s 3 times as expensive to fly just above Mach 1 as just below it. The Concorde SST was heavily subsidized as a national prestige project by Great Britain and France
In 1973, the FAA banned civilian supersonic flight over the United States. The ostensible reason was noise
No wonder Feynman found himself impressed. In Nanofuture, I described Drexler’s vision: Engines of Creation is a technophile’s dreamscape. It predicts microscopic replicating units able to build skyscraper sized objects to atomic precision. These could be buildings or they could be spaceships. It discusses artificial intelligence and engineering systems able to handle the enormous complexity such designs would require. It speaks of “easy and convenient” space travel, and describes a spacesuit so light and thin that you almost forget you’re wearing it (present-day spacesuits are very awkward and arduous to wear and work in). It mentions cell repair machines and curing “a disease called aging.” It talks about cryonics and resurrecting the frozen.
Feynman had only talked about recording the Britannica on a pinhead
Earth intercepts ~ 10¹⁷ watts of solar radiation.
a factory that can make 20,000 widgets a week is obviously worth two factories which can only make 10,000.
Moore’s Law is equivalent to a 60% growth curve. in a year and a half.
Medieval stained glass windows are an example of how nanotechnology was used in the pre-modern era.
Google Scholar lists no references to Feynman’s Plenty of Room, which had been published in a Caltech magazine in 1960
Richard Feynman asked, “What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?”
I call it the Machiavelli Effect; protecting their own turf.
major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.
The United States did catch up, with our GDP per capita exceeding Britain’s by the 20th century
OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!
increasing understanding of the workings of the molecular machines inside the cell, but capturing this as a mechanical technology was still outside the envelope
Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke listed two major forms of failure. Failure of Nerve and the Failure of the Imagination.
The Failure of Nerve applies when the facts are known—the science is there, the engineering understood, the pathway clear, and only the details remain to be worked out. But if the result is so far out of commonsense experience, it is all too easy to grasp for spurious reasons that it might be impossible. The classic case of this, of course, was the near-unanimous insistence of the scientific community that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible, a position that scientists continued to maintain for about five years after the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903.
The Failure of Imagination is, on the other hand, easier to understand and harder to prevent. It is essentially the same as Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns:” where the thing that is making your prediction wrong simply isn’t part of the toolkit of knowledge that you have available. An exemplary case of this was Rutherford’s insistence on the impossibility of nuclear power. He was the leading nuclear physicist of his day; indeed, he was the discoverer of the atomic nucleus. Yet he spoke before the discovery of the neutron and of nuclear fission.
According to Nature, scientific publishing has a growth rate of about 8%, for a doubling time of 9 years.
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, and they were, on that day, extremely lucky men. They thought they were lucky because they had managed to obtain the fusion of deuterium into helium in an electrochemical beaker. They had something that mainstream nuclear engineers could only dream of: a way to convert all the potential energy of deuterium to heat in a ridiculously simple and inexpensive apparatus.
Pg 112: Trace from a F&P cold fusion experiment from 1985-88: a calorimeter would run for two months producing the same power out as in, then for no apparent reason produce more than ten times as much out for a few days, then just as inexplicably quit.
Massive heat releases were rare; it was much more common for nothing at all to happen. Fleischmann was arguably the second foremost physical electrochemist in the world at that point. Steve Jones, a nuclear physicist at nearby Brigham Young University, for which he had coined the term “cold fusion”.
crackpots (and they are endless) come in with “limitless free energy” schemes that spring from the total ignorance of all the basic tenets of physics (such as conservation of mass/energy)
Lewis Strauss and “power too cheap to meter.”
nuclear energy, fission or fusion, is the same as the bottom line with “renewables:” for all practical purposes, the fuel is free and the cost of the delivered power is entirely capital cost.
Nanotech was Failure of Nerve; cold fusion is Failure of the Imagination
Aerocar was useful. Unlike simply owning an airplane, when you bought one you had a car. When you flew somewhere in one, you had a car when you got there.
Neutrality Act
I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated. If you are starting a computer-software company, that costs maybe $100,000. But to get a new drug through the FDA, maybe on the order of a billion dollars or so. —Peter Thiel
Everyone knows how to obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know how to “obey” laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (810 pages), the Affordable Care Act (1,024 pages) or Dodd-Frank (2,300 pages). —Charles Murray
If you want to start an automobile company in this country you need a handful of engineers—and at least 1000 lawyers. —Arnold Kling
Today, the federal regulatory code is over 175,000 pages long.
we don’t intuitively understand exponential growth.
Pg 143: the number of lawyers exploded in the 1970s due essentially entirely to the explosion of product liability lawsuits.
From Wells to E. E. “Doc” Smith to Asimov and Heinlein and van Vogt
you can make someone, including yourself, believe, using emotion instead of evidence. It is widely unappreciated just how much we are evolved to decieve ourselves.
Stephen King is an enormously best-selling author; statistics analysis website FiveThirtyEight tells us that horror movies are reliably the best investment in Hollywood.
It simply is not a falsifiable statement.
“Ergophobia” technically means a neurotic fear of doing work, in an individual.
anti-nuclear weapons movement that morphed into the anti-nuclear power movement.
Federal Energy Policy Act of 1992 mandates that “all faucet fixtures manufactured in the United States restrict maximum water flow at or below 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) at 80 pounds per square inch (psi) of water pressure or 2.2 gpm at 60 psi.”
Young men spending their time indoors playing video games, instead of outdoors playing with flying machines.
Many of the classic science fiction writers depict civilizations which rise and fall, as real ones have done throughout history. Asimov’s Foundation and Piper’s Terro-Human histories are based on historical cycles at the scale of the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of modern western civilization.
Heinlein’s prediction still stands out. he predicted a hiatus in space travel after what he calls a “False Dawn.” The Hiatus lasts for most of the twenty-first century, and is characterized by the “New Crusade,” a religious dictatorship which suppresses scientific research and technological advancement.
In today’s America, you can’t be trusted to ride on an airliner with a nail file. In the 50s, to go on a hunting trip you simply walked on to the plane with your rifle and put it in the overhead rack.
when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a Utopian romance set in the year 2000. The plot is as follows: Julian West is mesmerized to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000, when everything is wonderful. Occasionally he gets out and looks at some wonderful thing or another, but mostly he just sits and people lecture him about how wonderful things are. The reason things are wonderful is that the US has abolished money and private enterprise— essentially gone completely communist. People are not only much richer, but physically more well-formed and vigorous; greed and envy are unheardof; people are more honest; they care more for each other; violence is unknown. Nations don’t even make war on each other.
In the 19-Aughts, the average worker produced about 5 cars per year; by the Twenties, he produced 20. It was that factor-of-four productivity jump, spearheaded by Henry Ford and the assembly line
Hans Rosling classifies the wealthiness of the world’s population into four levels:
1. Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1.
2. Bicycle (and shoes). The $4 per day they make doesn’t sound like much to you and me but it is a huge step up from Level 1. There are three billion people at level 2.
3. The two billion people at Level 3 make $16 a day; a motorbike is within their reach.
4. At $64 per day, the one billion people at Level 4 own a car.
The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is.
The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000.
average speed on a bicycle is 9 mph. A sample survey using Google Maps indicates that transit typically takes something like three times as long as a car would.
the wartime way of thinking—(they sent fliers out with as little as one hour of training in the aircraft they were flying). The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents.
the pilot is doing four jobs at once: engineer for the motor and other mechanical systems of the plane; aviating it as just described; navigator; and radio operator. Each one of these alone is not a really hard job, but doing all four at once. the main thing different between a plane and a car is the danger of going slow, particularly when you are low and trying to land.
There are now fully autonomous aircraft which can do the entire job by themselves; you need only tell them where to go.
A wing like this can have a theoretical lift-to-drag ratio of over 100. Lift coefficient rises from 0.4 to 1.0, meaning you get two and a half times the lift. A well-designed glider can go 50 feet forward for each 1foot drop in altitude. Lift is proportional to the square of the speed and, within certain limits, to the angle of attack. The thing that makes piloting an art and a skill is that the angle of attack relationship fails at an angle somewhere between 15 and 20 degrees. Instead of increasing lift, further tilt causes it to disappear, a phenomenon known as stall.
As my flight instructor told me: “To go up, pull back on the yoke [which increases your angle of attack]. To go down fast, pull back some more.”
loading passengers and cargo into the plane is like loading a rowboat: you have to pay attention to where the center of gravity is, and in particular to the total weight. If the gunwales are awash, don’t lean out over the side! The closer to the max load you are, the more nearly you must be perfectly balanced.
Who needs a runway? A Robinson R44 in New Zealand, which has more helicopters per capita than any other country. Instead of thousands of feet of runway, 50 to 100 feet wide, the helicopter only needs a 10 by 10 foot pad. Virtually every hospital has a heliport.
Today, new helicopters are in the $1 to $10 million range, and used ones can be had for $100 thousand to $1 million. This is similar to the range for private jets
Suppose you are a farmer who sells tomatoes. You have a truck that gets 10 miles to the gallon. A gallon of gas costs, say, $5. If you deliver a truckload of tomatoes to a market 10 miles away, the round trip costs you $10. Let us further suppose that that is as much as you can spend on gas and break even on your tomatoes. You can sell tomatoes to anyone less than ten miles away but not to anyone further. Now suppose a truck becomes available that gets 20 miles to the gallon. You can now afford to deliver tomatoes up to 20 miles away for the same amount of gas. But notice: a circle with a 20-mile radius has four times the area of one with a 10-mile radius. All other things being equal, you have four times as many viable customers with the new truck.
Recovery of fossil fuels is by no means the only source of abundant energy that technology can open up to us. Oil isn’t free energy handed down from heaven.
Average price of a year’s energy, in chemical fuels: $6,553. In nuclear, $5.80. You can now understand why, at the dawn of the Atomic Age, some people reasonably imagined electricity might be “too cheap to meter.”
a one-inch cube of uranium, contains more energy than the average American uses in a lifetime. Uranium provides 80 TJ of energy per kilogram. Gasoline provides 0.000 047 TJ per kilogram
Isaac Asimov’s speculation—The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course—was completely reasonable
We really, really should have had atomic batteries by now. And guess what? Your iPhone would never need charging, and your Tesla would have a range of 3.5 million miles. It is a possibility.
One of the reasons that computers improved so rapidly in price/ performance over the past half-century is that the physics of computation don’t present the kind of “glass ceiling” that supersonic flight does for airplanes. (Another of course is that computers were essentially unregulated.)
Nixon banished a reactor that was virtually meltdown-proof. Thorium is three to four times as common as uranium, and doesn’t need the separate enrichment step—and the reactor could burn virtually all of it, rather than less than one percent. Proven reserves of uranium could power the globe for 77 years; of thorium for 6472 years.
If the reactor or generator fails, the plug melts, and the fuel flows into a sump where it’s too spread out to maintain a reaction.
uranium is too cheap already. All the cost is in regulatory compliance, and that would increase, rather than decrease
The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1946 was won by Hermann J. Muller for the demonstration that ionizing radiation caused genetic mutations, in his particular case using X-rays on fruit flies. doses above 400 rads, an exposure that today would be called 4000
4000 mGy is a huge dose; in fact, 50% of humans die from it if received in a short period. A typical CT scan, for comparison, is 10 mGy. The linear no-threshold (“LNT”) hypothesis has never been rigorously tested, and yet it seems to have become received wisdom in the radiophobic culture of the regulators.
they then proceed to point out that that level is 100 times greater than they allow for public radiation exposure. This is like setting a speed limit of 1 MPH because people have been injured doing 100. You can imagine what regulations made on the basis of this kind of thinking did to the cost of a nuclear power plant.
Yes, nuclear today is expensive. Shipping would be expensive too if trucks had to operate with a speed limit of 1 MPH.
itemized bill
We could have had flying cars in 1940, but for WWII. We could have started on nanotech in 1960. We could have started on solar power satellites in the 70s.
Counting watts is a better way to measure a people’s standard of living than counting dollars. dollars per kWh generated in the US has increased by 300% while actual power generated has increased by only 26% (more dollars, less value); Yes, we’re spending more dollars but (outside of computing and communication) most of what we’re getting for them is virtue signaling.
technically interested people (i.e. nerds)
Coal, which liberated mankind from the Malthusian trap, gave us manufacturing, railroads, and steamships, more than doubled our life expectancy, and saved almost all of us from having to be dirt farmers. Oil, which substantially replaced coal in the twentieth century, made airplanes and the private automobile possible along with the rest of the modern world.
The leading advantage is power to weight ratio
precision much, much higher than your hand motions can actually achieve.
ideas are evolutionarily selected for intuitive appeal rather than for objective truth.
Mobility gives you good climate all year round (just follow it)
Pg 430
December 27, 2021
This is the latest release by Stripe Press, which focuses on publishing Science and Technology books. Many are republished books that have long since been out of print and are hard to find, or selling for $800 on Amazon because they were mentioned on some podcast. I have bought most of them, the covers are colorful and unique. J. Storrs Hall originally published Where is My Flying Car? in 2018 in a version that was available online. Several different people have notably focused on the thesis that we are in a Great Stagnation. There were noticeable improvements in life from 1900 to 1960, but if you were in a room in 1960 compared to today it would mostly be the same.
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel summed it up: "We wanted flying cars; we got 140 characters." Tyler Cowen published a book called the Great Stagnation in 2011 which theorized that all the low-hanging technological fruit has been picked except for in a few areas like computing and that as a result, our economy has slumped since the 1970s. Ross Douthat recently wrote the Decadent Society that more broadly made this case that we are also slumping in other areas, see the 27 movies of the Marvel Universe. The Jetsons which took place in 2062 presents a clear vision of what the future could be. And while it is hard to tell if the predictions in The Jetsons were a satire of the science fiction of the time or realistic expectations, it is clear now that "Flying cars have become a symbol of a mismatch: The future as imagined in the first half of the 20th century seemed a lot brighter than the present we're living in now."
Hall however takes the argument beyond simply that we have stagnated and makes clear that the path to flying cars, cold fusion, nano-technology was achievable, in paths laid out by Richard Feynman and others to explore if we simply had the collective to achieve them. And yet there is still hope for what he calls a Second Atomic Age which is a coming together of nano-technology, AI, and nuclear power if do not continue to make the same mistakes. "Most of the technologies that I've examined here are those we could have had by now, had we not dropped the ball. Second Atomic Age technology is not something beyond our grasp." But we must be optimists (David Deutsch talks about this in, The Beginning of Infinity). We seem to not be living in the optimistic future of Robert Heinlein, but in the pessimistic and dystopian future of Philip K. Dick." Cowen recently has been optimistic that the mRNA vaccines and bio-tech are a sign we are coming out of the great stagnation, so hopefully, that is in fact the case, and we will have those flying cars soon.
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel summed it up: "We wanted flying cars; we got 140 characters." Tyler Cowen published a book called the Great Stagnation in 2011 which theorized that all the low-hanging technological fruit has been picked except for in a few areas like computing and that as a result, our economy has slumped since the 1970s. Ross Douthat recently wrote the Decadent Society that more broadly made this case that we are also slumping in other areas, see the 27 movies of the Marvel Universe. The Jetsons which took place in 2062 presents a clear vision of what the future could be. And while it is hard to tell if the predictions in The Jetsons were a satire of the science fiction of the time or realistic expectations, it is clear now that "Flying cars have become a symbol of a mismatch: The future as imagined in the first half of the 20th century seemed a lot brighter than the present we're living in now."
Hall however takes the argument beyond simply that we have stagnated and makes clear that the path to flying cars, cold fusion, nano-technology was achievable, in paths laid out by Richard Feynman and others to explore if we simply had the collective to achieve them. And yet there is still hope for what he calls a Second Atomic Age which is a coming together of nano-technology, AI, and nuclear power if do not continue to make the same mistakes. "Most of the technologies that I've examined here are those we could have had by now, had we not dropped the ball. Second Atomic Age technology is not something beyond our grasp." But we must be optimists (David Deutsch talks about this in, The Beginning of Infinity). We seem to not be living in the optimistic future of Robert Heinlein, but in the pessimistic and dystopian future of Philip K. Dick." Cowen recently has been optimistic that the mRNA vaccines and bio-tech are a sign we are coming out of the great stagnation, so hopefully, that is in fact the case, and we will have those flying cars soon.
November 13, 2023
Very enjoyable. I liked how practical it was and how it covered all the nuances of topics discussed from self-reproducing nanotech factories to how we could harness the sun energy and de-couple CO2 from the climate change argument... paraphrasing "if we can put a 2-mile wide mirror or billions of programmable nano mirrors up in the stratosphere we can reflect sunlight as we please... and we can then increase the amount of C02 from 400 ppm in the atmosphere to 800 ppm without affecting climate change." I found this very interesting as I've been monitoring the CO2 levels in my room before sleeping, and it hits 2000 ppm when I breathe on it. It's around 400 ppm with the windows open, and I've introduced plants to decrease it even further for a better night's sleep.
He also then talks about how this would annoy astronomers, but then astronomers would love it once it's repurposed into a 10000K wide telescope (they use mirrors, too)
This is just one example of how particle and in-depth he goes on such a topic as achieving a type 1 civilization based on the Kardashev scale. As a whole, this gave me a great sense of optimism for the future. I did find some parts drawn out and repeated, but overall, I really enjoyed this read. Kudos!
He also then talks about how this would annoy astronomers, but then astronomers would love it once it's repurposed into a 10000K wide telescope (they use mirrors, too)
This is just one example of how particle and in-depth he goes on such a topic as achieving a type 1 civilization based on the Kardashev scale. As a whole, this gave me a great sense of optimism for the future. I did find some parts drawn out and repeated, but overall, I really enjoyed this read. Kudos!
January 2, 2021
טוב זה היה ארוך.
פרופ' הול עושה את הכל לא נכון. הוא מפרסם ספר בהוצאה עצמית, במחיר של 3.14$ (פאי דולרים, חה!), לא שוכר עורך ולא לומד כתיבה לפני כן. ועדיין, 4 כוכבים וקריאה מהנה שהיה כיף לסיים איתה את שנת 2020.
הול, פרופ' למדמ"ח העוסק בננוטכנולוגיה שואל שאלה פשוטה. איפה, קיבינימאט, המכונית המעופפת שלי? מכוניות מעופפות כבר היו קיימות, מסתבר. כבר בשנות ה-50 היו דגמים של מכוניות מעופפות. לא על הריצפה, אלא באוויר. עם אלפי שעות טיסה. החל ממכוניות עם כנפיים מתקפלות וכלה במכוניות הנעה אנכית - היזמים והמהנדסים ציפו לעתיד מעופף ומזהיר. אז מה השתבש? השאלה הזו גורמת להול לעשות סיבוב עתידני בכל הטכנולוגיות שנמצאות ב-cutting edge שלפני הפריצה. היתוך קר, ננוטכנולוגיה, רובוטיקה, המהפכה האטומית השנייה. אין להול עורך שיקצר אותו, ולכן אין שום דבר שמונע ממנו מלזרוק בכל פרק עשרות ציטוטים, טבלאות, ניתוחים וצלילות עומק לתחומי מדע רק כדי להסביר אנקדוטה לא חשובה. לפעמים זה מעייף, ומצאתי את עצמי מדלג, אבל לפעמים החפירה פשוט מרתקת. הול הוא פשוט גיק שמחזיר אותי לילד המתלהב ממד"ב של פעם. היה נחמד להרגיש את זה שוב.
650 עמודים לא הולך ברגל. מצד שני, כולה 3.14$.
פרופ' הול עושה את הכל לא נכון. הוא מפרסם ספר בהוצאה עצמית, במחיר של 3.14$ (פאי דולרים, חה!), לא שוכר עורך ולא לומד כתיבה לפני כן. ועדיין, 4 כוכבים וקריאה מהנה שהיה כיף לסיים איתה את שנת 2020.
הול, פרופ' למדמ"ח העוסק בננוטכנולוגיה שואל שאלה פשוטה. איפה, קיבינימאט, המכונית המעופפת שלי? מכוניות מעופפות כבר היו קיימות, מסתבר. כבר בשנות ה-50 היו דגמים של מכוניות מעופפות. לא על הריצפה, אלא באוויר. עם אלפי שעות טיסה. החל ממכוניות עם כנפיים מתקפלות וכלה במכוניות הנעה אנכית - היזמים והמהנדסים ציפו לעתיד מעופף ומזהיר. אז מה השתבש? השאלה הזו גורמת להול לעשות סיבוב עתידני בכל הטכנולוגיות שנמצאות ב-cutting edge שלפני הפריצה. היתוך קר, ננוטכנולוגיה, רובוטיקה, המהפכה האטומית השנייה. אין להול עורך שיקצר אותו, ולכן אין שום דבר שמונע ממנו מלזרוק בכל פרק עשרות ציטוטים, טבלאות, ניתוחים וצלילות עומק לתחומי מדע רק כדי להסביר אנקדוטה לא חשובה. לפעמים זה מעייף, ומצאתי את עצמי מדלג, אבל לפעמים החפירה פשוט מרתקת. הול הוא פשוט גיק שמחזיר אותי לילד המתלהב ממד"ב של פעם. היה נחמד להרגיש את זה שוב.
650 עמודים לא הולך ברגל. מצד שני, כולה 3.14$.
May 29, 2023
I wrote a massive review and then Goodreads crashed so I lost it 😭 But in short, this is a look into futurology’s past and present. Why did humanity slow down technological progress after the mid 20th century? It’s quite a shame that we went from the first airplane to the moon in a few decades but then decided that was enough. Author blames several factors for this “great stagnation”; among them there’s strict regulation, apathy in funding, Luddites refusing to accept new approaches and discoveries, and of course the political/economical landscape. Seems like today’s world rewards people who innovate in ad-clicking technology more than they do for mechanical engineering innovators.
Electronics/computing being the only field that’s advanced considerably in recent history makes me a bit sad, as that’s technology that’s meant to help the development of other fields; computing doesn’t help humanity directly. Maybe AI protein folding will be the counter example here.
Electronics/computing being the only field that’s advanced considerably in recent history makes me a bit sad, as that’s technology that’s meant to help the development of other fields; computing doesn’t help humanity directly. Maybe AI protein folding will be the counter example here.
August 7, 2021
Offers a lot of great insight on the causes of the decline of technological progress since the 60s. And also offers good insights on the future of technology that could happen, if humanity dropped the new, green, religion, and went full steam ahead to develop and use energy for the betterment of the human condition - instead of limiting ourselves to 'save nature' and praying to the wind and sun gods for our daily energy. Then we will finally have our flying cars, and much more! However, the book could have been a bit shorter, if the author had slightly limited his enthusiasm for a particular tech, 'real nanotech', which was interesting at first, but to me this overemphasis started to detract from the overall structure of the book (it kept popping up all the time) and general enjoyment of reading the book. But with that sidenote, I recommend the book.
April 12, 2021
I enjoyed this book immensely. I guess it's a rather niche book for people interested in science, progress, technology and flying cars at the same time, but for those, it is great.
Turns out to answer where is my flying car we need to dive deep into the progress studies, nuclear, avionics, civil engineering, nanotechnology, history and so much more.
This book is a perfect example of why I love to read. Very smart author spends 10 years researching multiple domains and I can just read the summary of it in days. What an investment :)
Turns out to answer where is my flying car we need to dive deep into the progress studies, nuclear, avionics, civil engineering, nanotechnology, history and so much more.
This book is a perfect example of why I love to read. Very smart author spends 10 years researching multiple domains and I can just read the summary of it in days. What an investment :)
January 14, 2024
In 1899, Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and the floodgates of psychology was opened therewith. I see Where Is My Flying Car? in the same way: flawed, controversial, yet seminal in the study of progress.
It is hard to put into words what makes this book different from others: it would be like comparing stars to novae. Certainly I disagree with it often, sometimes strongly (e.g. the evolutionary game-theory model of moral development). Yet this, in itself, is what the book does well: it dares to hope. It forces the reader to engage with new ways of thinking about the world with every chapter. I will be reading this again, 11/10.
It is hard to put into words what makes this book different from others: it would be like comparing stars to novae. Certainly I disagree with it often, sometimes strongly (e.g. the evolutionary game-theory model of moral development). Yet this, in itself, is what the book does well: it dares to hope. It forces the reader to engage with new ways of thinking about the world with every chapter. I will be reading this again, 11/10.
April 9, 2022
This book covers a lot of different topics, and the author goes way beyond the central question of the book, “where is my flying car?”.
At times it was therefore harder for me to get through the book. I'm afraid I also have to disagree with the author on some topics like nuclear energy. Sure it’s an exciting power source but what to do with the waste? He doesn’t really answer that.
Overall I can recommend this book to people interested in science and science fiction.
At times it was therefore harder for me to get through the book. I'm afraid I also have to disagree with the author on some topics like nuclear energy. Sure it’s an exciting power source but what to do with the waste? He doesn’t really answer that.
Overall I can recommend this book to people interested in science and science fiction.
June 15, 2022
An enjoyable exploration of the history of aviation, that goes into why we don't all have flying cars and why the amount of energy each of us has access to has stagnated over the past 50 years. I like that you can read the frustration of the author through the text—why isn't the present like the future we were promised!
I'm not sure I'd want to live in a city like it's painted in the book though—the sound of thousands of flying machines would be ear-deafening.
I'm not sure I'd want to live in a city like it's painted in the book though—the sound of thousands of flying machines would be ear-deafening.
August 25, 2022
General lament of “Why isn’t the future better?” + classic sci-fi quotes + semi-detailed summaries of a collection of technologies, mostly aeronautical + general theses from the extended blogosphere of Tyler Cowen and Scott Alexander. I think other reviewers are right to the extent that it summarises the general ideology of the group of people claiming the banner of Progress Studies, but it felt too much like a book written for that group, adapting those tweetable ideas in book form, rather than anything truly novel. That is why I felt justified in abandoning the book after one hundred or so pages.
March 3, 2024
The rhetorical question that is the title of this book does capture what it is about - why people do not have flying cars as predicted decades ago. The thesis of the book is that it has nothing to do with technology, which is either developed enough to make flying cars practical (Hall discusses many attempted flying cars from decades ago) or could get there with committed efforts. Rather, he believes it is because of factors like excessive regulation, entrenched interests and lack of vision among the populace. While the flying car is the centerpiece of the argument, Hall addresses similar technologies that he believes could and should have been developed but for these obstacles, and considers the implications for the betterment of society if they could be developed.
The book is heavy on the science, but it's not overwhelming even though I lack any background in any of the scientific areas at issue. It's lighter on the policy, railing against the forces holding back the technology but not going into a lot of detail on how practically to address the obstacles or consider the repercussions of, say, eliminating regulation. As a think piece, it will do that: make you think about the potential for technological improvements that you hadn't considered and about what would need to happen for products and projects utilizing them to come to fruition.
The book is heavy on the science, but it's not overwhelming even though I lack any background in any of the scientific areas at issue. It's lighter on the policy, railing against the forces holding back the technology but not going into a lot of detail on how practically to address the obstacles or consider the repercussions of, say, eliminating regulation. As a think piece, it will do that: make you think about the potential for technological improvements that you hadn't considered and about what would need to happen for products and projects utilizing them to come to fruition.
October 11, 2020
Inspiring, wide-ranging, opinionated. Strongly recommended (even though I don’t agree with everything).
August 15, 2022
Great stuff. Learned a lot more than expected but also felt very overwhelmed by all the technicalities for airplanes and jet engines and the like. At times hard and challenging to read, most the of the times fascinating and inspiring even if I, from a sociological standpoint, disagree with quite a bit.
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