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I don't think history has taught us that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. Every technology the OP mentioned exists in na

I don't think history has taught us that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago. It's totally believable that all of them will be widely deployed in 20-40 years. The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.

eesmith 8y ago
You wrote: "Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago." That is not true. Here's the list: "cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?" How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001. Bikes of course are 19th century technology. Airbag helmets are new. Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s. CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes? Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new. "Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form? "Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out. The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.

eesmith 8y ago

You wrote: "Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago." That is not true. Here's the list: "cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?" How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001. Bikes of course are 19th century technology. Airbag helmets are new. Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s. CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes? Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new. "Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form? "Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out. The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.