To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that ended up happening.
We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency.
Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money.
We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.
No, Manhattan project took trivial amount of money by today's standard. It costed less than the rounding error in typically given federal budget figures for past few decades.
That’s about the same as NASA’s annual budget.
Truly, we are easily able to afford projects like Manhattan and Apollo today, it's just we aren't able to pull them off anymore.
But of that 4.7T budget we only spend 600 million of that on fusion research.
With the caveat: for commercial travel. And even then it’s partly due to noise restrictions. It’s not like the technology for supersonic flight isn’t widespread.
Nuclear power, let alone fusion. What happened to “too cheap to meter”?
Supersonic travel: raynier already pointed out what a bust the Concorde was. Nothing else on the horizon now.
Automation giving me a 20 hour work week. Nope, capital holders just skim that efficiency right into their pockets.
I’d go on, but suffice it to say that about the only thing much different than my childhood in the 70s are computers in our pockets. Revolutionary, no doubt, but we are still burning oil for our energy needs, our cars don’t fly, and I still show up and do my 40 hours. And healthcare has gotten worse in the U. S., not better, if you can believe that.
So, yeah, when the head of the autonomous driving division of VW says Level 5 ain’t gonna happen, I don’t immediately jump to doubting him/her and attacking their resume.
And yet HN threads are all about "here are all these cool things that will happen tomorrow if Elon Jesus delivers".
He ain't going to deliver, people.
[1]https://boomsupersonic.com/
Health care is worse? More expensive, yes, but anybody getting cancer and wanting to live is much better off now than in the 1970's.