I think your points are certainly common ones, but unfortunately they rely on three major misunderstandings.
The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials.
It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc.
The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing.
And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use.
If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?
Flying cars marry terrible airplanes with terrible cars. I’m not sure what would cause that general rule to be broken, but the demands of crash safety for cars add a lot of weight and weight is the killer negative metric for aircraft.
If you're going to license it as a low-speed vehicle (limited to 25 mph federally by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 500), you will be barred from many surface streets with speed limits of greater than 30 mph, depending on state law.
In trying to map out whether I could get from my house to my local airport exclusively on roads with 30 mph or lower speed limits, I had a hard time proving it. All of the obvious routes that I actually use had at least one segment with a speed limit of 35 mph or higher, which is barred by my state law (Massachusetts).
How many urgent messages do you need to dictate while you're running without your phone?
I'm actually surprised that the watch would work for that without the phone.
It wouldn't have network, so it works offline by itself and saves the urgent message until it regains a network connection?
I'm very thankful that I'm not physically impaired so I'm not forced to rely on the garbage that is the current state of voice commands.
I find it so infuriating to use that I won't do it, but you go for it. Perhaps your training data will improve it enough to eventually arrive at a usable state.
The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials.
It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc.
The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing.
And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use.
If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?