Flying Car Insurance

BEHOLD THE FUTURE... where for some reason the only
person who has access to a flying car is this gray-haired
woman in a burka, and everyone else is still left to traveling
by conventional cars in the background. It is more likely that
this picture is telling us that in the future old people will be
given flying cars because it will be less dangerous than
having them on the road with the rest of us.

Did you ever think it is weird that we do not have flying cars, or moon cities, or robot butlers? I mean it is 2012. In 3 years on October 21, 2015, Marty McFly is supposed to arrive from 1985 to find a future full of hoverboards, rooms filled with fax machines, and self-fitting clothing, and yet I still can't find a suit-jacket that fits me properly. Heck, according to Star Trek by 1993 genetic superman were supposed to seize control of more than 40 nations on the planet Earth, and yet in reality steroids are still outlawed by Major League Baseball. I will not even go into the disappointment of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I mean Pan-Am running a space tourism company?) So what happened?

In a nutshell, culture happened. Ironically, we have discovered that it is easier for us to predict how science and technology will advance rather than how culture will advance (and trust me we have tried.) Technology is created by humans so we can sort-of predict how it will progress, after all as as long as we can imagine it we can conceivable achieve it. However, culture changes so rapidly that there is no telling if the technology we want today will even be desirable in the future. For instance, in the 1950's people had all these grand ideas about the technology and appliances that would come available for the busy housewife in the future. Now technologically speaking household appliances have come a long way, but what those past futurists never really understood is that by the time those technologies existed Mom would no longer be in the kitchen, but in the workplace. The same is true of the flying car.

When talking about flying cars our ancestors never took into account some of the cultural and world imperatives that would arise in the last half-decade to make that dream somewhat improbably. For instance, even if the obvious safety problems of giving normal everyday people access to a flying hunk of metal, accelerants, and exotic plastics could be overcome, no one seemed to be able to predict the culture of litigation and frivolous lawsuits that would try to use the courts to sue over everything from hot coffee to video game violence. No car company in their right mind would assume the legal responsibility that would accompany the mass production of a machine with more litigation-related earning potential than a toy box full of rusty nails. Even more daunting is that by the end of summer gas prices will hover somewhere around $4.00 a gallon. I have a 12 gallon tank in my little Saturn, and yet I still wince when the pump ticks past $35.00. A flying car would not only consume more fuel and cost more to refill, but would probably also cause greater damage to the environment. No one thought of environment or gas  issues in the 1950's when cars were made of steel and American pie.

Basically, thanks to the intervening years and the changing priorities of our culture, often even when we have the technology to finally accomplish the things we thought we wanted, it turns out we do not want them any more. Its like being a kid and wishing you had enough money to get the GI Joe Battle Tank toy, and ten years later when you finally have a job and the money to afford that toy you find out you have other priorities in life. Hmm... spend money on a toy or dinner with a pretty lady... (duh... toy.)

Left: What people in 1952 thought the future would look like.
Right: Some hellish future-vision where women can vote.

The real problem with a lot of these past future-predictions is that when making assumptions about the future our ancestors thought technology would continue to grow and become more obvious, like robot butlers. However, what we have seen of technology over the past several decades is that technology does not become more obtrusive, instead it becomes more subtle and seems to disappear from plain view. Your cell phone has more computing power than biggest super computer of the 1970's. It has more technology and memory space than all the crafts that ever landed human beings on the moon combined, yet it is small enough to fit in your pocket. Wires are disappearing as everything goes wireless, microchips are shrinking to microscopic proportions, and soon even something as subtle as the home computer may disappear forever as its functionality just becomes incorporated into everyday life.

To complicate the matters, culture and technology have an almost symbiotic relationship with one another, (much like art and culture, but that is a whole other discussion.) As culture influences what technology is created, that technology then influences how culture develops. The most classic example of this is, the Internet. The world wide web was created by the US Government as a way to communicate and store records in a non-central location in case of a Soviet nuclear strike. Thus, its creation was influenced by the culture and times it was created in. Over thirty years later, the Internet has become the biggest driving force behind culture in the history of humanity. People live their lives on the Internet, children are growing up never having known anything other than Facebook, Twitter, or Google. For better and worse it has become one of the biggest factors in our lives, and because of that it is not only influencing things like our humor, our art, our porn accessibility, but it is legitimately creating a new global culture. I will not go into the impacts of the Internet on culture, since the list is incredibly longer than I could even begin to list, but it is worth mentioning that any visions of the future we now have, will always incorporate a network of information that allows for the rapid exchange of thoughts, ideas, and pictures of cats.

So where does all this leave us? Well initially, it means we will probably not have flying cars anytime in the near future or jet-packs or underwater cities, or etc. It is more likely cars will become smarter and cleaner first, and maybe even disappear altogether. However, it also means that any well-meaning prediction about the future will need to take into account the coming cultural shifts that will not only influence technology but be influenced by that technology, but those are no small predictions. Only a fool would really try to make any meaningful predictions about future-tech based solely upon his own hopes and ideas... So stay tuned for my next blog entry when I do just that.