Flying cars is one of those technologies that await autonomous drivers/​pilots. Once an autopilot is more reliable than a human pilot under most conditions, and this becomes widely recognized, those flying cars might, well, take off, once the economy of it is worked out, and the regulations are not in the way. I wonder if the author talks about it at all.
The obsession with nuclear power is quite natural. But nuclear fission, even the Thorium version, is still dirty and dangerous out of proportion to the benefits it provides, and is really hard to miniaturize. Seems it is one of those ideas can work well, but also is not hands-down better than the alternatives, like, say, wind and solar. Maybe once clean nuclear fusion is worked out, this will change. Again, not sure if this discussed in the book.
Living in Trantor-style buildings would be an interesting experiment, I wonder if anyone tried to scale up super-high-density living and how it worked out.
In general, it seems that almost everyone in the 70s and 90s underestimated how most innovations would be tied to having cheap ubiquitous always connected computers. We are still underestimating it, and I expect multiple qualitative societal shifts due to further miniaturization and proliferation.
Flying cars is one of those technologies that await autonomous drivers/​pilots. Once an autopilot is more reliable than a human pilot under most conditions, and this becomes widely recognized, those flying cars might, well, take off, once the economy of it is worked out, and the regulations are not in the way. I wonder if the author talks about it at all.
The obsession with nuclear power is quite natural. But nuclear fission, even the Thorium version, is still dirty and dangerous out of proportion to the benefits it provides, and is really hard to miniaturize. Seems it is one of those ideas can work well, but also is not hands-down better than the alternatives, like, say, wind and solar. Maybe once clean nuclear fusion is worked out, this will change. Again, not sure if this discussed in the book.
Living in Trantor-style buildings would be an interesting experiment, I wonder if anyone tried to scale up super-high-density living and how it worked out.
In general, it seems that almost everyone in the 70s and 90s underestimated how most innovations would be tied to having cheap ubiquitous always connected computers. We are still underestimating it, and I expect multiple qualitative societal shifts due to further miniaturization and proliferation.