Like the man says, it’ll be a couple of years!
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Our fully autonomous flying cars will be powered by cold fusion.
So, sometime next year. I think.
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Totally off topic, but speaking of Zeppelins - despite being truly spectacular in the worst possible way and highly publicised, in terms of lifes lost the Hindenburg doesn’t even make the top three of Airship disasters.
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If only there were some way to compare costs to benefits, and see when something is actually worth the risks. Ah well. Back to learning to live underground so I can survive all our wonderful technological progress.
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Right; the comparison to cars and airplanes is ridiculous.
The first automobile was patented in 1886. Within 20 years there were dozens of commerically available models on the roads including Fords, Peugeots, Cadillacs, Mercedes, Oldsmobiles and other juggernauts still pumping out cars today.
The first powered flight was in 1903. Within 20 years planes were crossing the Atlantic, changing the nature of warfare, delivering our mail and even ferrying passengers.
Autonomous cars have been around in some form or another since 1984 (with experimentation going back as far as the 1930s) and they haven’t revolutionized anything because they still kind of suck.
Even if those taxis can be made to function exactly as intended they’ll still suck for a whole host of reasons.
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Yup. I’ve recently seen a newsreel clip from the 1928 Pressa fair in Cologne. It briefly features a “self driving car”. I haven’t found out yet whether it was radio controlled (like the Houdina Radio Control system) or whether it just used the steel tram tracks in the road for guidance (like the RCA or the RRL systems did with wires under the road’s surface).
ETA:
And a lot of concept cars in the 1950ies that were supposed to be either remote controlled or autonomous and nuclear powered. A personal favourite is SIMCA’s 1958 Fulgur.
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it’s kind of ironic, because we’ve had self driving horses for more than 3 million years.
you can take the horse away from the carriage, but you can’t tell the carriage where to go. i guess.
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Merychippus sounds like it was happy all the time. So merry and chipper!
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During winter holidays I have been wished a Merychippus (and a Haplocyon too).
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The person behind this seems have given up listing the predictions now, but:
See also:
Apr 2023:
Jul 2023:
Self-driving R&D is clearly just a tax write-off and share price pumper. There is little real hope for it ever.
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Yeah… my point, actually! 
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