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Transportation Retro-Futuristics
jpatokal writes "Flashback to the future with UC Berkeley's Transportation Futuristics! An excellent exhibition of amazing diagrams on how transportation was expected to evolve, featuring flying saucer buses, airplane escape pods and, yes, monorails. But where are the Segways and SUVs?"
I suppose this was before the age of Star Trek. Much better than an underground subway between New York and Los Angeles would be a simple door you could walk through that instantly teleported you to the destination.
Alphanos
Looking at the image they have for the "flying-saucer bus", one would think that a slight part of that dream is alive in the form of "park-n-ride" bus services that many suburbs offer for their work commuters looking to get into the city without the wear on their cars and frustration of rush-hour traffic.
Sure, the buses don't fly, but the end result is somewhat similar in a "it's 2004, but no weekend trips to the moon" kind of way.
2.Not as safe - there STILL isn't enough AI computing power to control the traffic and fly the masses safely through the 3D "skyways".
It's not a computing power problem - it's a reliability problem. The computer on your desk has enough number-crunching ability to direct a city's traffic in 2D or 3D in real-time, especially if a simpler sub-optimal-but-good-enough algorithm is used.
The real problem with automatically controlled cars is that the system won't be perfect, and the consequences of failure either on the ground or in the air aren't acceptable. On the ground, your automated vehicle kills a pedestrian (because of vehicle control failure or because they did something foolish). In the air, a malfunction turns your vehicle into a few thousand pounds of flying metal (plus fuel!) looking for something fragile to crash down on.
The 2D case gives you prohibitive liability problems for the manufacturer, and the 3D case gives you accidents that are far less survivable and produce far more collateral damage than the 2D kind. All of these problems are solvable, and I firmly believe we'll end up with computer-controlled ground cars in the not too distant future, but it won't be a cakewalk.
Maybe the idiots in the 50s really did think that anyone who could drivecould surely be a pilot too?
That was the general idea, if I understand correctly. After all, how much harder can it be? (/irony)