These flying cars are essentially just snazzy helicopters for wealthy people and enthusiasts. They can 'never' scale to be a mass-market, rush-hour queuing solution and holiday mass-exodus.
Well 'never' is a long time, but at least quite a long way away before the AI, technology and materials can support a lot of traffic, mid-air fender benders, breakdowns etc.
A helicopter can't go from flying to transport you in a highway. When people talk about flying cars they imagine that. Something that can fly and go around roads as a _car_ would normally do.
I think this is ahistorical. Flying cars were always point to point "Jetson's" style vehicles, where you didn't HAVE a highway, because everyone just traveled as the crow flies.
It's only when this was obviously impossible that futurists pushed the "mostly a car but can also fly sometimes" angle.
> A helicopter can't go from flying to transport you in a highway
Yes and no. In some EU countries, helicopters accepted to land near highway, and pick up (or disembark) passengers just like ordinary taxi.
Also there very typical case, helicopter landed near Gas station to refuel.
Generally, strict restrictions exists on flights over large cities, but over rural area and over big water, regulations easier.
Even so, if in large city exists big river, aviation could flighting over it with very easy restrictions.
People's imagination is dumb. They picture cars ,the annoyance of being stuck in traffic, see all the empty sky and think, hmm, you know what would fix this, flying cars. But imagine that world, with millions of flying cars, and it'd be 10 times as awful.
What they fail to realize is how bad air congestion would be. Airplanes landing need a lot more separation than cars. Parking lots that now have 4 entrances/exists will need to share 1 with 10 neighbors.
Robot flying cars would still be awful. The car noise and pollution is already insufferable, now bring it overhead. And the fallout of an accident are already grotesque, now multiply this by 9,81.
Flying cars are a fetish: because they are futuristic technology, therefore they are desirable. That is the motive force behind them.
Yeah, something like the (even more) heavily modified DeLorean Doc Brown returned with from 2015. Key technologies still missing would be (a) the energy source (a "Mr. Fusion" which can generate energy from random garbage you throw into it) and (b) some kind of levitation not based on rotors, rockets or jet engines (anti-gravity?), apparently also used in the hoverboards.
I count that under the first of the two fuzzy constraints I wrote about: “the machine has to play nice music”
I agree that there Martin seems to be aiming for a very high degree of repeatability in timing, but it also seems that he has designs which meet those expectations of his and this was not the reason why he abandoned the second attempt. (Ad far as i can tell based on the videos.)
Many of the digital sequencing and notation products I've worked with went out of their way (arguably) to play "less-tight music" through various "humanizing" features.
Yes, we want music that is sufficiently accurate and "tight"... but within the confines of human capability. The slight errors of both time and intonation in some cases give music a much more human feel. Now to be fair, I don't want to suggest that this sort of human inaccuracy is mere randomness either: it's typically not just random error... there's usually a bias and it definitely within limits (unless you're a bad musician of course :-) ).
