Whatever happened to flying cars and other promises?
The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow’s Technology Still Isn’t Here. By Nicole Kobie. Bloomsbury Sigma; 368 pages; $28 and £18.99Are driverless cars hurtling around technology’s next corner? Not really, though not for lack of trying. The first quasi-autonomous car dates back more than 30 years.
It was the brainchild of a German academic, Ernst Dickmanns, who called his computer on wheels Versuchsfahrzeug für autonome Mobilität und Rechnersehen (test vehicle for autonomous mobility and computer vision). Hardly catchy. But in 1994 his Mercedes-Benz ferried dignitaries from Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris.
On the motorway the computer took control, and it hit top speeds of 130kph (80mph). Three decades later, Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxis can only dream of such va-va-voom. They are confined to the streets of Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.Suspend, for a moment, your fear of an onslaught of new technologies.
Instead consider the premise of “The Long History of the Future", a funny, counterintuitive new book by Nicole Kobie, a journalist. The most brilliant—and sometimes bonkers—minds of every generation set out to invent the stuff of people’s science-fiction fantasies, whether flying cars, robots that think for themselves or augmented-reality glasses. Sometimes they succeed.
Mostly they do not. Technological progress is often frustratingly slow and littered with false promises and mistaken assumptions about what people want.Elon Musk trumpets “full self-driving", but Tesla’s driverless-car technology still requires a driver for oversight—and probably will for ages to come. The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956.
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