A magazine of forecasts

A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5

Minority Report: Flying Cars Are a Bad Idea. THE FUTURIST interviews Donald Norman, Breed Professor of Design, Northwestern University; former VP, Apple; author of The Design of Future Things.

FUTURIST: Since the physics of flight are pretty well established, what would you say are some of the design issues that stand in the way of a flying car for every garage?

Norman: Let me start with a comment about movies, science fiction, and predictions of the future. This comment will be important in discussing things like the flying car. I have a lot of friends who are good science fiction writers and some of them are really good at understanding trends and extrapolating predictions. I've always argued that science fiction writers are the best futurists because when you write a novel you can't just take any technology and plunk it in the future. You have to show how it works within a system. And that's also true of good movies. Minority Report is one I use a lot because a lot of things they show will actually happen. In fact they're already here. Their technical advisor was a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab named William Mitchell. But, you know, I can always tell fiction because it always works. Nothing ever goes wrong. In real life, our most reliable stuff, stuff that's been around for decades, generations, breaks down. When initial designs aren't perfected they cause trouble. All of our technologies, every single technology, the steam engine, they used to blow up, killing people. The early automobile? You used to have to travel with your own mechanic. All of these technologies had a really difficult launching period. Think of the teleporter. The first few ones would probably have transferred only half your body. I can't imagine how it ever got started.

Now automobiles; in the United States, it's 43,000 that die every year and something like 6 million injured in auto accidents. That's driving that is occurring in two-dimensions [meaning forward and backward]. Can you imagine what with three dimensions? Car drivers are untrained. Airplane pilots have to undergo years of training and commercial airplane pilots have to be re-certified every six months in simulators where they test every possible failure.

Forget the physics. Forget the economics of manufacture, which is what's really holding it back; I can't imagine the traffic calamities when people start taking off in all directions. There have been a couple of movies where people have had flying cars, like Blade Runner. They never show accidents. They never showed crashes. The Fifth Element was clearly an homage to Blade Runner. Remember that movie? The cab diver was crazy. You want to fly into that?

And finally, do you sail? Think of those great big sailboats and compare those to a little dingy, one that's two or three meters long, a little one sail and that's all, which is the equivalent of what most people would drive in a flying car. The dingy is harder to sail than the big boat because the big one is stable. The little one will tip a bit with everything you do. If you watch people out sailing, the little ones flip over a lot. The big ones? No no. When they flip over, it's a rare tragedy.

FUTURIST: I read something in your book--you talk about adaptive cruise control, which is: cars adjusting their speed and direction based on data that the systems in the car is gathering from the cars around it. You also call it the "gossiping: car. The Moller Corporation, who have been active in this field for a long time, want to combine technology like that with GPS to make a safe flying car. The Moller cars would avoid crashing into one another or crashing into each other based on the system's understanding of where it was in space, as opposed to the pilot's understanding. In your book, you create a hypothetical news story about a man named Neumann who gets stuck in a roundabout for 14 hours because his car, which has a very weak version of a similar system, perceives too many cars surrounding him and gives him a little warning whenever he tries to get out of his lane to get out of the roundabout, and the car gives him a little resistance in the wheel. Because of this, he's stuck in this roundabout for 14 hours and has to be taken to the hospital for dehydration and mild shock. So, something like adaptive cruise control, something born of fairly recent IT advances, does it really make the flying car scenario more plausible?

Norman: That's technology's answer to these questions. Automation will solve all those problems. Everyday drivers could not possibly fly their own airplanes but they wouldn't have to, the theory goes, because the airplanes will fly themselves. In principle, that's absolutely correct. But what happens when things go wrong? The Neumann story is one I made up, but it is realistic. There are other, true stories in the book about people who follow their GPS and wind up in the middle of streams or stuck in tunnels. Those are people who are following the suggestions of their technology, but the technology is faulty. For GPS to work like it's supposed to, you would need accurate [digital] map information, to within a few feet, of every single road, sign, and runway, and that information changes millions of times a day. The same is true of airline group maps, the maps that pilots use. You could argue that navigation would be easier with small planes than on the road because once you're in the air, there's nothing in the way. You don't have to know anything about streets or intersections or roads. But that's not completely true. In cities there are, of course, buildings.

FUTURIST: You also mention some firms that are actually working on this adaptive cruise control thing?

Norman: For cars, you know about the DARPA Grand Challenge? They had two Grand Challenges, the first was to automate a car to do a complex desert trip all by itself. They offered a million-dollar prize. I don't know how many cars entered the first year but none of them succeeded. The second year, a fair number of cars finished. I have no doubt that automated cars will happen. But there are a few problems. How do you introduce it? Now, in the case of a personal airplane, they would be completely automatic from the first. But in automobiles, they would not be. The only place they might work is certain cities in China and maybe Singapore, a country where they could create a mandate, could say "we're going to start over again and you can only drive a car that's completely automatic." In the United States it would be impossible. That's true of these individual airplanes too.

Keep in mind, there are kits for hang gliding, motorized hang gliding. There's general aviation. While a lot of these people are allowed to fly without fancy automation or even a flight plan, there are certain places you can't go. Do I think that eventually they'll bring out an airplane that will be reasonably affordable and will they be relatively popular? Yes, but we're talking tens of thousands of buyers, not hundreds of millions. If they're very successful, they might sell ten thousand.

FUTURIST: Earlier you mentioned that the sheer economics of flying cars is prohibitive. How do you mean?

Norman: Look at the same solution when applied to commercial aviation, the FAA has been trying for years to mandate a system--for every plane--where every single plane has to have a live map of the planes around it and the pilot can therefore select their own routes and they don't need aircraft control. And people believed there would be fewer accidents and the routes would be more efficient because, of course, today everyone must fly on these published roots. They can't fly horizontally. No one believes that central command and control is the most efficient way to regulate large-scale systems, what you want is individual intelligences. It's like the Internet, the way it works--there is no sense of control. Every little packet does its thing and knows where the other packets are and it works. But, the cost per airplane, just for that type of system, would be $10,000.

FUTURIST: Thinking about these 1960s television shows and the images that they've given us, I'm referring specifically to this the notion of living in an automatic universe, one of the great things that I liked about your book is this idea that the automatic world is an impoverished utopia, one where much of the task of living has essentially been relinquished. You also talk about how a more human utopia is one where machines help us do more of what we can do, and those tasks are more enjoyable. How do we, as a society, get over this silly dream of a future where everything is done for us by machines, and get more excited about this future where we're able to do more with our machines?

Norman: I don't think there's any problem. I don't think society has that dream. Authors do, inventors, some people have that dream; but even those people have things in their life they love to do and wouldn't want to turn over to machines. In that sense, I think society will regulate itself. For instance, I really like the fact that the heating in my apartment is completely automatic and don't have to think about it. I do have to think about it once or twice a year and I find that annoying. The refrigerator is completely automatic and I don't have to think about it. I like to cook but I don't like to wash dishes so I have a dishwasher and actually I wish it were easier to use the dishwasher, because the hard part about a dishwasher is loading and unloading. There are lots of things in my life like that. I don't develop any new skills loading and unloading my dishwasher. I think this is the way people move. You automate the unpleasant things and then manually do the things you like.

Music is a great example. These days, you never have to be without high-quality music. So, with all this wonderful music, why do so many people still buy musical instruments and expend a lot money learning to play? It's fun to play a musical instrument, even if you aren't good at it. So you do it yourself because it's fun, but until you're good at it, you listen to real professionals.

FUTURIST: So according to this theory, the only labor that survives in the future is that which is also enjoyable or ennobling aside from its central utility function.

Norman: What's nice about automation is that you can choose which things you won't worry about, or WHEN it will be done by a machine as opposed to when I'll do it myself, but it would economically unsound to think that technology could stop all physical work.

FUTURIST: What's your favorite future technology, the breakthrough that you see changing our lives for the better in a really dramatic way?

Norman: A technology that doesn't yet exist?

FUTURIST: Well...

Norman: No, I'm going to give you one, education. The educational system today is a baby-sitting system where workers have someone watch and, increasingly, for longer and longer. Most "education" today is done by someone lecturing to you or reading you a book. That's a teaching system, not necessarily a learning system. Teaching is what's easiest for teachers to do, but learning requires getting your hands dirty and doing things and what we need is a technology that motivates you, makes you interested. The best way to learn something is to do it. The same is true even complex topics. Teachers are always saying, "That's all very fine, but there are all these fundamentals people really have to know." The problem is, they teach the fundamentals first when the learners have no idea why they're learning; and they hate it. The proper way to make someone learn is to throw them into a problem so they get interested, and then maybe fail. Now, you tell them to go back and read the fundamentals and then they'll know why they're reading it.

We need to deliver education where it's needed. Some people call this kid learning or just-in-time learning. People are already playing with it. The principle is this, "I want to make the motor in my model car go faster so I want to figure out how I can improve it. I may actually have to learn a little bit about thermodynamics and the workings of engines. So I'll sit down at this machine and put a screen over my eyes and headphones over my ears and suddenly I'm in this simulation and I get to move and manipulate the parts and see animations and there's the mathematics, which I can explore and play with." The point is that just in-time learning would improve the world and be fun and it would be accessible around the world.

Patrick Tucker is the Senior Editor of THE FUTURIST and the director of communications for the World Future Society.

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