Progress, Stagnation, and Flying Cars
rootsofprogress.org
rootsofprogress.org
Let's imagine that the higher specific energy consumption and correspondingly higher fuel cost of flying cars is not a problem. For example, American households in the top income decile could quadruple their consumption of gasoline and it wouldn't be a financial hardship.
So why don't high income Americans have flying cars? Why are $100k+ cars from luxury brands still stubbornly earthbound?
Hall quotes a post on a message board suggesting that even if you had built a flying car and were ready to take to the air, you’d be shot down by the FAA, the mayor, the news media, the insurance company, and your neighbors.
I can easily imagine some objections from the FAA, insurance company, and neighbors. There's nary a word here attempting to rebut them. Nor to explain how cheaper energy would solve any of these problems.
It's nice to imagine that cheap energy would enable the dreams of science fiction authors circa 1970. In a few cases it would even be true. But probably not in most cases. There are already a few petro-states that have very cheap energy for all citizens. They don't have flying cars either.
What results? Most likely, huge increases in accidents and fatalities.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/06/are-helicopters-...
Even if they were, they block a lot of sunlight.
I’d elevate the city instead. That’s essentially Manhattan.
>[...lawyers..] 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.
to the lawyers we need to add law enforcement and armed forces and the damage resulting from the application of force. That is the tax our civilization pays for not having intelligence high enough to avoid that violence, be it a lawyer's action enforced by court or a soldier shooting the rifle. If anything, that is my version of Great Filter - progress being completely bogged down by that practice and infrastructure of violence.
I don't think we'll be able to get out of it while staying in the confines of out current society on this planet (with the exception of a totally fantastical scenario - like aliens arrival - that would put a fire under the bottoms of our spines :), and only new colonies on Moon, Mars, etc. can develop new ways of societal co-existence.
> the cost of the U.S. tort system consumes about two percent of GDP, on average. If we assume this mostly started around 1980 when lawyers skyrocketed... without it our economy today would be twice the size it actually is... more than a million of the country’s most talented and motivated people [are] filing briefs against each other... instead of inventing, developing, and manufacturing things which could have made life better.
This is the best way to describe the patent system.
I know a company that advertises help for people that have inventions. I spoke to them once, and they advised me to take a patent, bury it, and then sue the next guy who develops a similar item, as it is more lucrative and less risky than developing a product and then fighting whoever else has created a similar enough product that they can sue me.
> One, the success of industrial civilization at meeting everyone’s basic needs for food, clothing and shelter pushed people up Maslow’s Hierarchy to seek self-actualization, which they did in the form of social activism.
Take a look at the "Rats of NIMH"[1]. When a society becomes well to do enough, a percentage will start to identify themselves by identifying and destroying what they immaturely assume to be wrong in others without understanding the advantages of mutual understanding.
(slightly off topic, but IMO "woke", "cancel culture", "white supremacy" and most other vigilante all fall in that category. There are definitely things that should fought against, but democracy has mature ways of fighting about ideas that were learnt the hard way and forgotten easily.)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopi...
Not only do the experiments tell very little about mice and their behaviour (other than that non-species-appropriate husbandry conditions will lead to degeneration and death), they are in no way shape or form transferable to humans.
You can skip the whole flawed mouse experiment and just look at any industrial meat, egg or pelt production or even many zoos - same difference. The animals suffer, display behavioural disorders and often won't procreate.
Just ask any zoo how difficult it is to get certain animals to breed in captivity - with some it's even thought to be impossible (cheetahs are a prominent example).
So please, for love of Zeus stop with the "Mouse Utopia" already!
This is a flawed assumption. You would need to look at the cost of the alternative. If we had drastically fewer lawyers and judges we wouldn't have a utopia where everyone follows the rules
The 'rat utopia' in those experiments is actually a dystopia: plenty of food, sure, but you've got a large population crammed into a small space with nothing to keep them occupied.
That's not 'well to do'... it's cheap welfare block housing with no employment available.
As for the "Stagnation" narrative: I don't see it. It seems to me that "Stagnation" is proclaimed by Dark Enlightenment types who measure progress by the height of the phallic buildings a civilization builds (ah, right, of course "a set of towers a hundred kilometers tall with a magnetic accelerator to shoot payloads" is not phallic imagery at all...), by the use of energy (most emblematic in proof of work cryptocurrencies, where value is created through the expenditure of energy for expenditure's sake), etc.
I measure progress by ingenuity. I see a world where a wristwatch has more computing power than the a supercomputer had a generation ago; where in-ear headphones or hearing aids can perform highly sophisticated signal processing on the fly, and where neural network based algorithms are currently improving performance by leaps and bounds.
I am not saying the author of the book is right, but I do buy a partial stagnation argument. I’d call it “hard physics”, or “large scale physics”. Maybe it’s interminent. Fusion could be around the corner. Maybe physics isn’t this never-ending tree of useful knowledge - maybe the science method allowed us to quickly exhaust the low hanging fruit.
We didn’t build a machine to operate a broom – we built vacuum cleaners. We didn’t engineer wings for firefighters – we built fire extinguisher drones. We also didn’t create robot personal shoppers – we built online stores.
A flying car is perhaps similarly a rather old-fashioned idea of what a futuristic utopia should look like.
> The major value in a flying car (as with supersonic) would not be in taking the same trips you do now, only a bit faster. Instead, it would be in taking the trips you don’t take now, because they’re too inconvenient. A flying car would shrink your world, expanding the radius of what you would consider for a commute, a shopping trip, a visit to friends, a business meeting, or a weekend vacation. [...] increasing the effective radius for each of those trips increases the effective area open to you quadratically (doubling your travel radius means four times as many destinations).
This very same effect happened on a small scale in the last ten years, when Uber/ride-sharing unlocked journeys that would have been impractical for many with regular taxis. Affordable flying cars would do the same, but with a much bigger sphere of impact.
We should be able to get a view of Level 5 by looking at, well, lifestyles of the rich and famous. When you get the helicopter, the private jet, and a house big enough to have a helipad, you're there on high energy consumption transportation. Still can't get to the office that way, though.
Flying cars, of the big electric quadrotor variety, are in test. Battery energy density is still too low, but they do work.
There's plenty of room for progress on the bio side. It's interesting that it's not widely accepted that aging is a disease. It may be possible to re-engineer humans so that they just go on with the resiliency of twentysomethings until accident gets them.
We're seeing a resurgence of nuclear power, in China.
Perhaps we're just seeing the stagnation of the US. The same thing happened to Japan, but it started about a decade earlier.
*regionally.
The problem with nuclear power in China is that access to water required for cooling is only available in less than 1/3 of the country.
This plus the comparatively long build time compared to other methods of power generation holds it back even there; the percentage of total power generation is still in the single digits, too, so there's plenty of room for growth either way.
Any thermal method will have the same constraint, though fossil-based methods are being phased out. Gas-turbine generators can simply discharge to the air, but high-efficiency dual-cycle generation includes a secondary steam phase, requiring cooling.
Solar thermal may utilise secondary cooling (though rarely, possibly never, does).
Solar and wind benefit by energy storage, for which pumped-hydro remains the best option.
Long-distance power transmission is exceptionally efficient. China's major population and industry are in its eastern provinces, power needed elsewhere can be transmitted with low (~6%) line and transformer losses, though with disruption risk from storms, natural disasters, or accidents.
"Reggionally limited" doesn't seem a huge ipediment.
But I found the OP to be more than "just a review:" It's a thought-provoking narrative that stands on its own.
Rather than summarize its key points here, or voice any agreements or disagreements I may have with it, I will instead recommend you read it in its entirety before passing judgment.
I ordered a copy of the book after reading it.
Uh, no. Drexler nanotech was "killed" by being a completely impractical fantasy. "True" nanotech is chemistry and biology, fields that are both doing just fine, thanks.
True molecular assembly might never happen, but it's not clear that advances in 'room at the bottom' ideas of nanotech wouldn't have happened, had there been a larger research effort. Advances in using silicon lithographic techniques to produce machines on a micro-scale are pretty amazing - I'm fascinated by the idea of the MIT micro gas turbine (apparently the scaling is such that an aircraft skin covered in micro-turbines could be comparably efficient to macro-scale engines) but I don't think the research has progressed since the early 2000s.
But atoms ain't Lego bricks, and you can't turn cute 3D animations [1] into real mechanisms by wishful thinking.
[1] https://chem.beloit.edu/classes/nanotech/nanorex/index.html
As for the reference animations I am not sure if they actually correspond to real physics even if you could arrange the molecules in such a fashion.
Of course biology does such things but the scale here is a different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYt5135_0bs
I think if you wanted to do what Feynman wanted you would need extremely accurate simulations that would include your mechanism for construction.
I ran into these issues when doing electrochemical deposition for copper microstructures. The effect had an interaction with the double layer that drove the deposition. This basically meant that the mechanism for construction was very fickle.
Well, they are made with molecular mechanics simulations, so I imagine they are very accurate at every point, except where atoms moving in different directions interact.
They are also not completely wrong at those points, but probably wrong enough for the work to be useless.
Anyway, your complaint applies to Drexler's work, not to his goals. Yes, he didn't really try to make a working device (WTF is that obsession with gears? Notice only the last 3 designs have anything to do with molecular construction? Somewhere on his site he explains those 3 came from a student, while he was focusing on the gears.) and was much more prolific as a sci-fi author than a scientist. That doesn't mean that the idea can not be implemented.
Perhaps its addressed in the book but: Highways keep moving when even birds are forced to land because of weather. the "Flying" part of a flying car would only be useful in mild weather, and I think many people would prefer to remain able to disregard all but the worst storms in their travel plans.
That said, people still fly ultralights, so its not a strong counter-argument. All those points that the author makes and the review highlights are worth considering.
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
One of the research assistants assisting in literature searches applied concepts from the piece to his own writing. His name was Isaac Asimov.
A key element is that much of the reward of market-property based systems comes not from increased productive capacity but by asset inflation and cost externalisation.
On other factors putting brakes on adoption of technology:
1. Negative externalities. Flying cars carry noise, safety, and complexity costs, many not borne by the owner, operator, user, or beneficiary.
2. Conflicting constraints. Ground and air craft have different requirements, and the compromises between them make for designs which are far from optimal to either task.
3. Transportation addresses the problem of movement through space ... which is one that can be addressed through other means: increased density, more sensible land use, telecommunications, improved delivery and logistics.
4. All innovations and technologies combine intended and unintended effects, apparent and covert consequences, and immediate and latent impacts. With time, unintended covert long-term impacts become more apparent, and are most often negative.
5. Complexity costs, a/k/a technical debt, are unintended, covert, latent, and negative.
6. With increased complexities, risks tend toward systemic, global, and catastrophic. Technological societies are complex.
7. Mature political systems tend away from executive power --- the capacity to get things done or make them happen --- and toward veto power --- the capacity to prevent progress. It's interesting to note that widespread ground-transport expansion, most especially railroads, has most often occurred either in newly-industrialised nations, or those recently disrupted by major warfare. High-speed rail in particular emerged in postwar Japan France, and Germany, as well as industrialising China. It has lagged or failed utterly in the UK and US, where wealthy landowners can exert veto power. High land values are the natural enemy of transportation megaprojects.
8. Risk in technically-complex projects can be divided into technical and human-factors risks. As technical risks are more completely addressed, the residual risk is dominated by human factors, which are by definition not technically addressable.
So why is he opining on structural and mechanical engineering in the large?
Serious red flag straight away.
Noting that the author's treatment fails to take into account multiple factors would be more compelling. I see several such opportunities.
My own equally-qualified opinion is that we don't have flying cars primarily because we don't want them very much.
As people richer they spend an increasing share of their income on services (e.g. eating takeout instead of making our own food), on intangible positional goods, such as living in sought-after neighbourhoods (sometimes in worse material circumstances) and wearing fashionable clothes (which are often poorer quality than no-name equivalents), and on seeking to control the behaviour of others (e.g. homeowner associations in the USA).