Whatever happened to flying cars and other promises?

Are driverless cars hurtling around technology’s next corner? Not really, though not for lack of trying. The first quasi-autonomous car dates back more than 30 years. It was the brainchild of a German academic, Ernst Dickmanns, who called his computer on wheels Versuchsfahrzeug für autonome Mobilität und Rechnersehen (test vehicle for autonomous mobility and computer vision). Hardly catchy. But in 1994 his Mercedes-Benz ferried dignitaries from Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris. On the motorway the computer took control, and it hit top speeds of 130kph (80mph). Three decades later, Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxis can only dream of such va-va-voom. They are confined to the streets of Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

Suspend, for a moment, your fear of an onslaught of new technologies. Instead consider the premise of “The Long History of the Future”, a funny, counterintuitive new book by Nicole Kobie, a journalist. The most brilliant—and sometimes bonkers—minds of every generation set out to invent the stuff of people’s science-fiction fantasies, whether flying cars, robots that think for themselves or augmented-reality glasses. Sometimes they succeed. Mostly they do not. Technological progress is often frustratingly slow and littered with false promises and mistaken assumptions about what people want.

Elon Musk trumpets “full self-driving”, but Tesla’s driverless-car technology still requires a driver for oversight—and probably will for ages to come. The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956. It has made a big leap forward with generative AI in the past few years, but it is still not clear how large language models go from putting one word after the next to thinking for themselves. As for robots, the author writes: “We’re afraid of them taking over the world, but most of them can’t do anything beyond walking a few steps without our instructions.”

This may sound glib. But for all her jocularity, Ms Kobie goes deep into the history of technology to show how often the hype disguises tech’s dependence on humans. Britain’s first robot, Eric, made its debut as guest of honour at the Exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers in London in 1928, standing in, reportedly, for the Duke of York. (His voice was that of a human transmitted by radio.) The Convair, a car with an attachable plane, crash-landed near San Diego in 1947 because its pilot mistook the car’s dashboard for the plane’s and ran out of fuel.

The book’s bigger point is important. Who decided that humanity needs these futuristic artefacts? Most of the entrepreneurs involved were men with a mindset that technology solves all problems. But their views often lack common sense. Advocates of autonomous driving argue that it will make the roads safer, but could bigger public-transport networks not do that more effectively? Traffic is bad enough on Earth. Do we really want more of it in the skies, with flying cars? Technologists are trying to build futuristic “smart cities” in developing countries like India. Yet some of those places still lack sewers.

The book, rich in storytelling, lacks one critical insight. However slow technologies are to come to fruition, they build on the back of each other, and every so often there are bursts of awe-inspiring creativity. The steam engine unleashed a wave of ingenuity in the 19th century. So did electricity in the 1930s. You do not have to believe that AIs will take over the world to consider the possibility that generative AI could bring about another big bang.

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© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com

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Published: 25 Oct 2024, 06:00 PM IST