![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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). How serious were the technical obstacles?īefore reading this book, I assumed that there were serious technical problems here. 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. ![]() Josh describes, in more detail than I wanted, a wide variety of plausible approaches to building flying cars. 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. 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.ĭid flying cars prove to be technically harder than expected? 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. economic growth slowed in the 1970s, and why growth is still disappointing. Josh provides a decent argument that we should treat that absence as a clue to why U.S. It was a widespread vision of leading technologists. This can't be dismissed as just a minor error of some obscure forecasters. The absence of flying cars is used as an argument against futurists' ability to predict technology. 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. But before looking at those, I'll look in some depth at three industries that exemplify the Great Strangulation. Josh's main explanation for the Great Strangulation is the rise of Green fundamentalism, but he also describes other cultural / political factors that seem related. 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). 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. It significantly changed my opinion of the Great Stagnation. The book is full of mostly good insights. 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". Storrs Hall (aka Josh) looks at the post-1970 slowdown in innovation that Cowen describes in The Great Stagnation. 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).īut this book attributes the absence of that industry to a broad set of problems that are keeping us poor.
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