Where Is My Flying Car?

I recently came across an excellent book, Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. It was originally self-published, and then it was taken up by the wonderful Stripe Press, seemingly the only publisher today who cares about how beautifully made its hardcover books are. And yes, Stripe Press is actually run by the payment company Stripe. I think it is largely a personal project by CEO Patrick Collison, who I'm sure personally selected the small number (currently 14) of books it publishes.

I didn't remark on it at the time, but Stripe Press has appeared in Breakfast Bytes before, since it is the company that published The Dream Machine that I discussed in my post "Lick" Licklider, Unsung Hero of US Computer Science. I said that the book was out of print there, but it turns out Stripe Press somehow got the rights and republished it.

Here is part of the description of the flying car book from the Stripe Press website:

In Where Is My Flying Car?, engineer and futurist J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer the deceptively simple question posed in the book’s title. What starts as an exploration of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an examination of the global economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion and nanotechnology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution.

Tom Beckley's keynotes often have featured his wish for his flying car. For example, see my post CDNLive EMEA Eins.

Semiconductors

Let's take a brief detour to semiconductors. If you are reading Breakfast Bytes, then you probably work somewhere in the semiconductor ecosystem designing chips, manufacturing chips, writing EDA software, and so on. When I first came to the US, I worked for VLSI Technology. It has been venture funded (by Hambrecht and Quist, plus some corporate investors), and a lot of that money went to building a fab. LSI Logic, founded around the same time, was similar. There are two aspects of that which are unusual. Firstly, that you could raise enough money to build a fab. I don't know how much that fab cost, but the numbers for a modern fab are in the $20B and up range. Secondly, when you compare that to today, that the company got funded at all. Even fabless semiconductor companies, which are a lot less capital intensive than what today we call an IDM, which stands for integrated device manufacturer, which back then we just called a semiconductor company since all semiconductor companies had their own fabs. Until the recent wave of AI startups, it was very difficult to get funded for any company that was not pure software. Every VC wanted to fund the next Instagram or WhatsApp, famously acquired for billions of dollars despite only having a dozen or so employees. I think that the current wave of AI startups will lead to a bloodbath since they cannot all succeed, and then, probably, VCs will retreat to only funding software companies.

My Grandparents

My three grandparents (my father's mother died when he was a teenager, so I never met my fourth grandparent) were born in the late 1890s. When they died in the 1980s, I reflected on the changes that they had seen during their lives. When they were born, the only transport was walking, cycling, or riding a horse. They lived to see men walking on the moon. In their lifetime, plane flights became routine, although I don't think any of the three of them ever went on a plane. My father's father never learned to drive, but my mother's father had a car from fairly early days. When driving tests were introduced in the UK in 1935, he was exempted and so didn't need to take the new test.

Of course, electricity existed by the time they were born, but it was only in the 1920s or so that electricity to the home started to become commonplace. I rewired a couple of apartments in Edinburgh, one my own and one for a friend, both about 100 years old and was puzzled to find small pipes in the plaster of the walls. It took me a moment to realize that they were gas pipes from the pre-electric days of gas lighting. It was a very physical sign of one aspect of progress during the life of my grandparents. Another aspect of electricity was refrigeration. My grandmother never really got used to refrigerators and continued to keep her meat in a "meat safe," an airy box with screens to keep any flies out.

But there were developments during their life of much more than transport. Antibiotics, for one thing. I'm sure you've heard the story about how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin almost by accident. You may also know that the first patient treated with penicillin was Albert Alexander, a policeman in his 40s who supposedly scratched himself on a rose, and the wound had become infected. He was given penicillin, and the next morning instead of being dead, he was much recovered. Unfortunately, there was not enough penicillin in existence to complete his treatment, and he relapsed and died a few weeks later. But antibiotics were not just important for treating trivial injuries that had become infected. They were one of the things that enabled surgery to become more routine (along with the concept of keeping things sterile, the invention of anesthesia, and probably more things).

A lot more things changed, but not everything changed at the same rate. I wrote about some of this in my post about Agatha Christie, "I Couldn't Imagine Being Too Poor for Servants, or Rich Enough for a Car." I pointed out in that post that the more things involve physical materials, as opposed to semiconductors and software, the slower they are to change. Quote from me:

Henry Ford would be amazed by a modern car, but he'd still recognize it despite all the improvements. Alexander Graham Bell would be clueless about a smartphone.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is famous for many things, such as co-founding PayPal and writing the first check to Facebook. But probably his most famous pithy quote is:

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

There have been developments since then: Twitter increased its limit to 280 characters in 2018!

This quote is a very succinct summary of something that Peter has been saying for years, that we are not really making much progress in anything to do with atoms as opposed to bits. There are some exceptions. Elon Musk has three "atom" companies: Tesla (cars), SpaceX (rockets), and the Boring Company (tunnels). The competition to these companies tends to be large and bureaucratic. NASA and Boeing, "legacy automotive OEMs," meaning companies like Ford, VW, and Toyota, and whoever it is that built the New York City Second Avenue Subway that cost about $2.5B per mile. NASA is paying Boeing many times what it is paying SpaceX for a fraction of the number of launches to the International Space Station (ISS). So far, its vehicle has not flown a single manned mission (and the project started in 2010). It remains to be seen how the current automotive companies fare in the new era of what the industry calls the "software-defined car." For more color on that, see my post AEK: Powerpoint Is Easy—Change is Hard. And the next phase of the Second Avenue Subway is 1.5 miles and is forecast to cost $6B (and will probably exceed its budget if history is any guide). To be fair, the cost is mostly in the stations, not the tunnels.

Peter Thiel spoke at the Oxford Union in January. He covered a lot of these points, and it was recorded (it's a little over an hour):

I think that the Q&A is more interesting than his prepared remarks, but the whole thing is worth watching or listening to.

 

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