Where Is My Flying Car?
I recently came across an excellent book, Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. It was originally self-published, and then it was taken up by the wonderful Stripe Press, seemingly the only publisher today who cares about how beautifully made its hardcover books are. And yes, Stripe Press is actually run by the payment company Stripe. I think it is largely a personal project by CEO Patrick Collison, who I'm sure personally selected the small number (currently 14) of books it publishes.
I didn't remark on it at the time, but Stripe Press has appeared in Breakfast Bytes before, since it is the company that published The Dream Machine that I discussed in my post "Lick" Licklider, Unsung Hero of US Computer Science. I said that the book was out of print there, but it turns out Stripe Press somehow got the rights and republished it.
Here is part of the description of the flying car book from the Stripe Press website:
In Where Is My Flying Car?, engineer and futurist J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer the deceptively simple question posed in the book’s title. What starts as an exploration of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an examination of the global economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion and nanotechnology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution.
Tom Beckley's keynotes often have featured his wish for his flying car. For example, see my post CDNLive EMEA Eins.
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Semiconductors
Let's take a brief detour to semiconductors. If you are reading Breakfast Bytes, then you probably work
somewhere in the semiconductor ecosystem designing chips, manufacturing chips, writing EDA software, and so on. When I first came to the US, I worked for VLSI Technology. It has been venture funded (by Hambrecht and Quist, plus some corporate investors), and a lot of that money went to building a fab. LSI Logic, founded around the same time, was similar. There are two aspects of that which are unusual. Firstly, that you could raise enough money to build a fab. I don't know how much that fab cost, but the numbers for a modern fab are in the $20B and up range. Secondly, when you compare that to today, that the company got funded at all. Even fabless semiconductor companies, which are a lot less capital intensive than what today we call an IDM, which stands for integrated device manufacturer, which back then we just called a semiconductor company since all semiconductor companies had their own fabs. Until the recent wave of AI startups, it was very difficult to get funded for any company that was not pure software. Every VC wanted to fund the next Instagram or WhatsApp, famously acquired for billions of dollars despite only having a dozen or so employees. I think that the current wave of AI startups will lead to a bloodbath since they cannot all succeed, and then, probably, VCs will retreat to only funding software companies.
Owner, Adaptalog Limited
1yYou (or the author) just torpedoed my interest in this book. Cold fusion was not "suppressed" - this conspiracy theory lacks both a factual basis and a motive for suppression. The initial idea was stimulated by some speculative work from early C20. It was then briefly brought into fashion following work by Fleischmann and Pons has not been replicated - the rational explanation for their results now being subtly flawed technique. Google assigned a reasonable sum ($10M) to verification, but apparently found nothing. Working theories predict nuclear separations that are orders of maginitude too great for such an effect to occur. Given this and the quality of the available data, no-one would have bothered further with this, except that the implications (if real) are so great. BTW, I am not here referring to medium-term implications in terms of energy production that might have caused concern to the fossil fuel producers: the amounts of energy released are tiny compared with the energy involved in preparing samples. The implications would be to physics theories*, and the pull for this is of similar magnitude to the conservative resistance. *Theoretical changes might (fusion energy time-scales+) lead to applications