In cities, consider this: as computing power and sensor tech improves, it will be possible to have a realtime map of all the circulation over a city; ATC would not just allow for but use the impact of each vehicle, plus ground-based thrusters and so forth, to manage all the traffic and air currents as an integrated whole. You don’t get to control your aircar by hand in town, of course, but then you won’t get to control your ground car, either.

The carrying capacity of the airspace over a city isn’t big enough to handle even 1/1000 of the cars that are driving on the roads beneath it. End of story.

Without significant automation and AI, turning hordes of untrained operators loose in the skys will be a disaster.

As I pilot, I’m sure you’re right. But full automation of flying is already possible, and full automation of driving is just around the corner. Within a generation or so it will probably be illegal to manually drive a car in most places. The safety and economic benefits are too great for that not to happen. I love to drive and will hate to give it up, but driving a car or riding a motorcycle will, quite soon, be anachronistic skills akin to riding a horse.

In the next place, and parallel with the motor truck, there will develop the hired or privately owned motor carriage.

It seems to me that this pretty accurately predicts the private car. How does it not? I grant that Wells may have underestimated how common ownership would become (even carriages were only owned by the fairly well-to-do, in his day). And he clearly underestimated how common it would be for people to drive themselves. But he seem to have the general idea of a private car, spot on.

So I think it is repeating the same mistake to apply our own concepts of the social order to new technologies. Seeing them as democratizing forces, or further empowering the middle class, is an instance of the same kind of simplistic extrapolation which tripped up 19th century forecasters. Chances are we will view future changes with the same dismay which every generation has felt as its assumptions were upended.

For example, perhaps we might see widespread voluntary adoption of mind control, where people turn some aspects of their minds over to a controlling entity, for some recompense. We might see the final death of privacy. We might see increasing polarization and a vast increase in inequality of power and wealth beyond any historical precedent. We might see replication of human-level intelligence become so cheap, common and widespread that it is of essentially no economic value.

So yes, maybe we’ll have flying cars, but they will be only for the rich. For the rest of us, our jobs, even our lives, will be as uploads resident in the car firmware. I will be controlling the right front propeller servo to compensate for moment to moment variations in wind speed and atmospheric conditions. Brave new world indeed!

I think we have the same conceptual problem with flying-cars. Even the name itself suggest an extension of the current automobile instead of a game changing technology with its own unique capabilities and patterns of uses. For example, most flying-car concepts center around speeding up the commute into and between urban cores even through that mode of transportation is rapidly declining. Most people in America today are more likely to travel from part of suburbia to another than they are to commute to an urban core. Future transport, whatever the form, will enhance this new mode, not the dominant mode of the 1950′s.

In short, the “flying-car” won’t be a “car” anymore than a “horseless carriage” was carriage. It will be its own thing with its own advantages and disadvantages. We should start thinking from scratch by chunking the name “flying-car”. Call it “point-to-point, individual aerial transport” and think about it as a totally new thing instead of just an extension of existing systems.

As we move towards a greener, more egalitarian utopia, such scientific advances will be less and less likely. After all, we’ll always have some group of poor unfortunates who need free health care or some such other public largesse. Doing our duty in providing for such needy will require turning away from such illusory progress as free-wheeling science might seem to promise.