Why you won’t get a flying car

Stripe Press was kind enough to send me several books it had published, and one of these was J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car?. I had been meaning to read this book for a while, especially after Tyler Cowen recommended it and Jason Crawford gave it a glowing review, so I was glad Stripe gave me a copy. I promptly stuck it on my shelf, paid for the audiobook, and listened to it while walking around San Francisco. That’s called ordinary abundance, folks!

In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” When I first saw that quote, I chuckled, because for my entire life, we’ve had flying buses. And again and again, as I sit on a flying bus and marvel at the thrill of takeoff, and reflect on how amazing it is that man has conquered the air, I look around and see my fellow passengers with their window shades drawn, their noses buried in a book or staring at a phone.

If we had flying cars, we’d enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we’d be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.

I’ve noticed a loose collection of beliefs and attitudes that I’ve decided to call “engineerism”, because I see it most often among engineers. I coined the term when I was in college, when I noticed that the engineering majors in my physics classes tended to think differently about the world than the physics majors like myself did. Later, I recognized “engineerism” in various sci-fi novels — Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Peace War by Vernor Vinge, and so on.¹

When I say “engineerism”, I am not talking about Friedrich Hayek’s “engineering mentality” — the belief that society can be designed and optimized like a machine.² Nor am I referring to Evgeny Morozov’s “technological solutionism”, which is the idea that social problems can be fixed with technology. If I had to define what I call “engineerism” in succinct, simple terms, it would be something like: “The idea that if a technology can be built, we ought to build it.” Simply put, engineers like to engineer things, and they become disgruntled when society does not give them the resources to do this.

Of course, engineerism is not quite so simple in the real world. It involves a lot of thinking habits that come in handy in engineering — linear approximation, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and so on. And in America, it also involves a set of beliefs that have sort of accreted over the years — for example, a belief in the importance of nuclear power.

I’ve had the concept of engineerism kicking around in my mind for many years, but in Where Is My Flying Car? I have found its perfect encapsulation — you might even say its Bible. Nowhere are both the value and the limitations of engineerism more perfectly on display than in this book.

Where Is My Flying Car? occupies an interesting middle space between genres. Futurism is about predicting the future. Science fiction is about (among other things) speculating on possible futures. And history of technology explains the past. Where Is My Flying Car? has bits of all three of these, but fundamentally it’s a book of retrofuturism — it’s about the technologies we thought we would get but didn’t, and why we didn’t, and how we could get them now.

The main technology Hall talks about is, unsurprisingly, flying cars. The other three are cold fusion, nanotechnology (Hall’s own area of research), and nuclear (fission) power. Hall argues that a combination of overregulation, scientific groupthink, bad funding mechanisms, and cultural aversion prevented us from achieving all four of these.

The Galileo Fallacy

Wait…cold fusion? Is that even real?? Well, not as far as we know, no. In 1989, two top chemists reported that they had managed to get much more heat out of a nuclear experiment than chemistry would be able to produce. The chemists thought that they had discovered a way to produce nuclear fusion without injecting huge amounts of energy — smashing ions together at insanely high speed, blasting them with a laser, etc. If it worked, cold fusion would be an incredible energy source.

So naturally, a lot of people tried to follow up on cold fusion. A wave of initial replication efforts mostly failed (though some people claimed to find the effect). But there have been plenty more efforts, including:

• A Japanese government project in the 1990s, with funding of around $20 million

• A project by Toyota in the 1990s, with around $18 million in funding

• A project by the Electric Power Research Institute in the 2000s, with around $10 million in funding

• A project by Google in the 2010s, with $10 million of funding

None of these efforts have reliably reproduced the effect that the two chemists claimed in 1989. A few of the researchers found some strange anomalies and possible new physical effects, but nothing even remotely similar to the kind of energy source that cold fusion would represent — and no consistent evidence that fusion is causing the occasional anomalies.³ Some other scientists have found ways to enhance fusion using chemical techniques vaguely reminiscent of the methods in the 1989 experiments, but nothing remotely close to the scale of what “cold fusion” would require. There’s interesting nuclear physics going on in solid-state chemistry, but the original burst of excitement around the 1989 experiment looks like it was misplaced.

That’s not the way Hall tells it, though. He claims that cold fusion is a promising area of research, and that what he terms the “Machiavelli Effect” — basically, vested interests trying to shut down research that would supersede their own research programs — strangled the promising field of cold fusion in its cradle by stigmatizing it and depriving it of funding.

That story just doesn’t pass the smell test. Multiple optimistic, good-faith research efforts, from various countries, from both the public and private sectors, have each thrown tens of millions of dollars at the idea, despite repeated lack of success. That is just not what a marginalized area of science looks like. Yes, lots of people regarded (and regard) the idea of cold fusion as kooky, but plenty of others didn’t and don’t — including the people who headed the many multimillion-dollar research efforts.

Hall knew about all of those efforts, and their outcomes, when he published the 2021 version of his book. But although he mentions some of them, he continues to insist that cold fusion research was mainly stifled by malign social influences. And in his projections of the possibilities of the future, cold fusion figures prominently.

This suggests one weakness of engineerism — the stubborn, contrarian belief that if someone tells you something is impossible, it must be possible. Yes, people sneered unfairly at cold fusion back in the 90s, but that doesn’t mean it must actually work. Not everyone who gets persecuted by the Church is Galileo.

Hall’s stubborn love for the idea of cold fusion also has the unfortunate effect of reducing the credibility of other parts of his book. I am no expert in nanotech, and Hall is an expert. But when he relies on the magical effects of atom-sized nanotech to support key parts of his future visions, I’m skeptical of how much of that is based on careful homework and how much is based on pure optimism. When Hall tells us that nanotech should eventually be able to rebuild the U.S.’ entire existing infrastructure in a few hours, I naturally wonder if the back-of-the-envelope calculations that support that conclusion were the only ones he needed to do.⁴ If Hall hadn’t gone all-in on cold fusion, I would have probably been less instinctively skeptical of the nanotech sections.

To the stars! (But why?)

One of Hall’s main points in Where Is My Flying Car? — and the book’s best point, in my opinion — is that physical technology began to stagnate when energy use