you forgot an automated air traffic management system with the capabilities exceeding that of the best military radars of today, ie. capable of automatically tr

you forgot an automated air traffic management system with the capabilities exceeding that of the best military radars of today, ie. capable of automatically tracking and routing thousands of those flying cars in the small volume, and the flying cars of course flying on autopilot following that system's directions. So, in a sense that is an infrastructure issue. That infrastructure isn't going to be built until there are a lot of those cars. A lot of those cars of course can't appear without support of such an infrastructure. Thus that slow progress - those Chinese human carrying octocopters will start flying here and there, and the Lilium and eVolo, ... Hardware-wise the "flying car" is cheap - https://youtu.be/EQK9m_OBVgY?t=27 https://youtu.be/EQK9m_OBVgY?t=27 - just need better batteries which will come in due time (and with the power and motors at least in duplicate or even triplicate contours the N-copters make for much higher safety than say a single rotor helicopter) . >[...lawyers..] This is the closest we can come to measuring the effect of taking more than a million of the country’s most talented and motivated people and put them to work making arguments and filing briefs against each other so their efforts mostly cancel out, instead of inventing, developing, and manufacturing things which could have made life better. to the lawyers we need to add law enforcement and armed forces and the damage resulting from the application of force. That is the tax our civilization pays for not having intelligence high enough to avoid that violence, be it a lawyer's action enforced by court or a soldier shooting the rifle. If anything, that is my version of Great Filter - progress being completely bogged down by that practice and infrastructure of violence. I don't think we'll be able to get out of it while staying in the confines of out current society on this planet (with the exception of a totally fantastical scenario - like aliens arrival - that would put a fire under the bottoms of our spines :), and only new colonies on Moon, Mars, etc. can develop new ways of societal co-existence.