Did anyone actually expect a flying car?
One of the best policy books in recent years was J Storrs Hall’s Where is My Flying Car?. Taking seriously Peter Thiel’s now infamous nostrum (‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’), the book takes an extended look at what it would take to radically accelerate technological progress, and why it has not happened so far.
But did anyone actually expect flying cars? In a recent poll for Public First, we asked the public about a series of technological and social changes: which they thought as a child would happen in their lifetime, and which they believe now. Just 17% of the public said that as a child or teenager that they thought that flying cars would arrive in their lifetime - and 8% say they expect them now.
Perhaps there is some selective memory involved, but this doesn’t seem to be just reduced expectations compared to the heyday of 1950s style futurism: older people were even less likely to say they expected flying cars in their lifetime, with just 8% of those over 65 saying they expected them as a child or teenager.
Some of this low expectation is just because people are unsure. When we reversed the framing, only 35% said they did not believe they would not happen this century - but this will still the second most scepticism of any of the technology options we tested about (flying cars, creating a permanent Mars base, self-driving cars, bringing back an extinct species, reaching a human level of intelligence, curing cancer, human genetic augmentation, widespread VR adoption.)
Another way to cut the data is to look at the change between what people expected in their childhood and what they expect now. From this lens, people report actually becoming more confident about AI, self-driving cars, nuclear fusion, human genetic augmentation and VR - while becoming more disillusioned about flying cars, curing cancer or a permanent Mars base. (The old were particularly sceptical about the prospects of a Mars base either in their lifetimes or their next century, suggesting they are not quite convinced by SpaceX’s ambitions.)
Interestingly, despite the widespread scepticism about specific technologies, the respondents to our poll were much more optimistic about growth more generically. When we asked how much higher or lower they expected average incomes in 2100 to be than today, the average answer worked out to be 85% higher - less, but not crazily less, than the implied 186% from the OBR’s long term economic assumptions.
Even more striking, is that Progress Studies style concerns about slowing growth or technological progress don’t yet seem to have cut through. When we asked whether they thought technological progress in the twenty-first century would be faster or slower than in the twentieth, only 10% thought it would be slower - and a majority (57%) thought it would be faster.
Out of those who do expect it to be slower, the most popular hypothesis as to why was a Bloom et al style belief that it was just getting harder to make new discoveries. By contrast the drivers that someone like J Storrs Hall (or me) might put more weight on - regulation and risk aversion - were only seen as a cause by around 20%, with little difference between Conservative and Labour leaning voters.
What to conclude from all this? To some extent, the low expectation for specific technologies is probably partly caused by the public’s general reluctance in polls to say that they expect anything that sounds weird, or too much like science fiction. Outside of a movie, when people think of the future they probably expect it to look fairly similar to today - which, to be fair, would have been a not unreasonable assumption for much of the last 30, if not 70, years.
But if advocates of general Progress - or even more specific radical technological breaks from nuclear fusion to hypersonic flight to geothermal energy - want more public support, one of the first steps might have to be persuading the public that more is both desirable and possible.
