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Dude, Where's My Flying Car (and Jetpack, and Robot Armies)?

Whatever did happen to yesterday's beloved technologies of tomorrow?

Posted 12.1.08 at 12:54 pm 1 Comments

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Flying Car

When Was it Promised: Surprisingly, the idea of a flying car has been around almost as long as the car itself. None other than Henry Ford first tinkered with the idea, attempting to build a “plane car” as early as 1926. Unfortunately, that early prototype crashed and killed its driver. Never a good sign. But Ford stuck with it, and as late as 1940 continued to believe car and plane would one day be joined.

What’s the Holdup: According to Bruce Calkins, general manager of Moller International, which designed the Skycar, the problem has been funding. The technology to make a flying car has been available since after World War II, but there has really been little need for a flying car. Planes were and are better for long distance flight and heavy hauling, and the helicopter has filled in the role of a small aircraft. As a result, there isn’t much of a market left for personal air vehicles, and investment has been hard to come by.

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Science.fan

12/06/08 at 2:20 am

I earned a degree in Computer Science in 1968, motivated in large part by an interest in artificial intelligence. I have been a close observer of the field ever since and can not let these comments in PopSci.com go unchallenged. To say that our failure to create human-level AI is due to inadequate funding by DARPA indicates a total lack of understanding of the problem. Rather, what the last fifty years of effort has demonstrated is that the goal will not be achieved by writing code and continually pining for another X-fold increase in computer power. We have followed that path for decades and achieved little if anything. Yes, a desktop computer can beat the human World Chess Champion, but that computer understands chess no better than a handheld calculator understands mathematics. It possesses no "consciousness" or ability to generalize to any other problem. Attempting to program our way to an AI was a reasonable thing to try and many valiant efforts were made. However, we must now recognize that that path will not succeed. Our best hope is to learn how the human brain and cortex process inputs and apply those lessons to the problem. Fortunately, a growing number of researchers are moving in that direction, and after these many years I am still optimistic that the goal will be achieved.