Where's My Flying Car
Where’s My Flying Car
Where’s My Flying Car: A Memoir of Futures Past by J Storrs Hall — a book-length answer to the question “Why didn’t the future that people expected in the 1950s come to pass, and how could we get back on track?” Ben Reinhardt calls it “simultaneously extremely critical of the state of atom-based technology and presents a precise and aggressively optimistic vision of possible futures.”
Hall’s core thesis traces the stagnation of physical technology to a convergence of causes:
- Energy divergence: a coupling between energy harness, atom-based technology, and economic growth; in the 1970s the US deviated from an exponentially increasing energy-use curve, and much of what hasn’t been built since is downstream of that break.
- The Machiavelli Effect: entrenched interests blocking paradigmatic change, tied to Kuhnian paradigm shifts; Hall argues this effect has grown stronger over time.
- Regulation explosion: an order-of-magnitude increase in regulation as a core stagnation driver; Hall shows the gap between what could have been built and what was permitted.
- Ergophobia: “fear of harnessing more energy” — a cultural preference for efficiency over new capability.
- Academic demand for novelty: institutional incentives that push against building on and scaling proven ideas.
Reinhardt’s summary of Hall’s optimism: “The optimistic science fiction of the past reflected an actual conviction that these things would be possible. Contrast to modern optimistic visions of the future that are tinged with ‘It would be cool if that happens… but it probably won’t.’” Technological futures are “shockingly contingent and could have been different” — which means they could still be different.
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