Where is My Flying Car?

It is not the Haves attacked by the Have-Nots; it is the Doers attacked by the Do-Nots.

But it was the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the respect given to Doers instead of Do-Nots, during the Industrial Revolution that made the modern world possible. Physics didn’t change. People did.

The answer is prosaic: Forecasters in the 50s were wrong. It’s not that the future never arrived—it’s that the future brought us different stuff than we thought we were going to get. Our lack of flying cars simply doesn’t tell us anything about the pace of innovation.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got the ability to instantly connect with anyone anywhere in the world, to share stories, pictures, music, podcasts, ideas, film, animation, comics, feedback, friendship, love, and our lives. Flying cars seem really cool on their face, but I somehow doubt that they would have so meaningful an impact on our lives.

There is, however, one trend which may work against the establishment of a virtually instantaneously global transportation system. As communications improve, until all the senses—and not merely vision and hearing—can be projected

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.

Newcomen and Savery steam engines of 300 years ago, we

My computer science mentor at Rutgers University had a quip: “To the first approximation, the hardware is free.” What he meant is that the complexity of software required a lot of high-powered, and thus high-priced, brainpower. The complexity, and thus the software, was the bottleneck to increased capability.

One possibility is that there is an Overton window effect in technology, a window into the world of ideas that frames what people are prepared to entertain, where ideas outside the window are not seriously considered. Really revolutionary ideas simply roll off men’s minds like water off a duck.

“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty,” Richard Feynman said, “that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”

Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

Furthermore, due to the high difficulty of replication, it is all too easy for an honest but inexperienced researcher to fool himself into thinking he has attained positive results when he hasn’t. This is an additional source of unreliability in the research literature. Careful studies have shown that only about 20 percent of published results could be replicated in, say, the biotechnology research literature.

This is an additional source of unreliability in the research literature. Careful studies have shown that only about 20 percent of published results could be replicated in, say, the biotechnology research literature.

Among scientists, it is an article of faith that basic research is a public good—that it provides much more overall benefit than it costs, but the benefit is spread so broadly across society that it is in no one’s private interest to fund it.

Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and by their nature they are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas. The ivory tower has a moat full of crocodiles.

it had been up to the NIH to cure polio, we’d have the best iron lungs in the world but we still wouldn’t have the Salk vaccine. —Samuel Broder, director of the National Cancer Institute

If it had been up to the NIH to cure polio, we’d have the best iron lungs in the world but we still wouldn’t have the Salk vaccine. —Samuel Broder, director of the National Cancer Institute

Technology grew like gangbusters in the first half of the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the second half that education took off. So apparently it’s not higher education that’s really responsible for dramatic technological growth.

If combining existing technology to accomplish the previously impossible isn’t an innovative advance, what is?

If combining existing technology to accomplish the previously impossible isn’t an innovative advance, what is?

However much a specialist may spy all the earlier efforts behind the parts and elements of a new machine, what the world notices is whether or not the machine works.

Academia is much more interested in “mind candy,” intellectual tricks that impress other intellectuals with the intelligence of whoever thought them up, as contrasted with mundane techniques that just happen to work and do something useful.

The Failure of Nerve is essentially thinking inside too small a box. The walls don’t really exist; you can walk right through them with your existing knowledge and techniques.

A century ago, all the smart young people had to make their way in the real world, facing all the messy problems of life, work, and production, and some of them had imagination and nerve enough to invent new and better ways to solve them. Today, all too many of their descendants spend all too much time in the ivory tower, ever more dependent on handouts from the bureaucracy, and spend their time, efforts, and ingenuity inventing better ways to write grant applications.

When we see one flower in the desert, we ask about the plant. When we see them everywhere, we ask when it rained.