SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — When he was still a boy making long, tedious trips between his school and his woodsy home in the mountains during the 1980s, JoeBen Bevirt began fantasizing about flying cars that could whisk him to his destination in a matter of minutes.
As CEO of Joby Aviation, Bevirt is getting closer to turning his boyhood flights of fancy into a dream come true as he and latter-day versions of the Wright Brothers launch a new class of electric-powered aircraft vying to become taxis in the sky. more
Not if the government decides to regulate them.
People can’t drive for shit as it is. Now put them into a fast aeroplane and watch them all kill one another.
Passenger pilots won’t work, obviously. The ability to think in real time about three dimensional space, its contents to include independent and largely random moving objects, and the rules that would have to be applied to avoid conflict (i.e. mid-air collisions), is somewhat limited among a population of transportation consumers few of whom can, in only two dimensions, change highway lanes smoothly or even parallel park.
And turning this over to AI, which is about due to take over the planet and start killing us defective humans, seems, ahem, imprudent.
It will be a while before we start transporting ourselves in the air in any significant numbers using methods other than the big aluminum flying tubes we use today.
I’m visiting the Las Vegas area this weekend. The number of fat-assed people is incredible. How much horsepower will it take to lift three or four 300 pounders off the ground? I don’t see flying cars becoming a reality until we get the country healthy again.