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Mike Hosking: Time to end tech fantasy talk

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Wed, 20 Jun 2018, 9:11AM
Elon Musk. (Photo: NZ Herald)
Elon Musk. (Photo: NZ Herald)

Mike Hosking: Time to end tech fantasy talk

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Wed, 20 Jun 2018, 9:11AM

When does the technical farce and fantasy end?

Uber have announced this week they're working with Boeing, and they're going to have a flying taxi ready for us in 2020.

Auckland is one of the potential trial cites. Is this for real? No. So why do we report it as such?

We seem to live in an age when anyone can say any old random thing they like and they are somehow reported as being serious.

Elon Musk has led investors round the mulberry bush so many times with his production promises and yet no one seems to want to call it as the fraud it is.

His cars can blow up, crash, he can miss every deadline he's ever set and still we report each and every utterance around flamethrowers and driverless cockpits as though it's fact as opposed to science fiction.

The predictions if you think about it were once the domain of the distant future, sometimes not even in our lifetime. But nowadays it’s all happening tomorrow. 2020 is the next election year, it's technically in a year and a half's time.

Honestly ask yourself do you really expect to see flying taxis in Auckland in 2020?

Elon, by the way, is still as far as I know claiming he's flying us to London in his rocket ship in 45 minutes not long after we have caught the flying taxi to the airport.

All the while, Optus this week, the Australian telco can't stream the Football World Cup. They can't get a picture from Moscow to Sydney. So how's Elon doing it with people? How is Uber doing it with a cab?

Somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to rationalise all this.

Somewhere along the way a barrier crashed and we went from people who queried how any of the fanciful stuff was possible, to people who just seem to let it wash over us.

Maybe that's the trick? Maybe none of us actually believe it? We just can't be bothered raising questions about it. What we have is a world that has outreached its technical capability. We think too far beyond our means.

Nothing wrong with the concept, but we take that and put it into a real world scenario that's farcical as well as fanciful. Uber's flying cab will cost three million bucks a pop.

A cabbie in a Prius barely makes a living in a car worth $20,000. How are you making money out of three million? What's that fare worth? See no one asks any of this.

If there is a flying cab in Auckland in 2020, come back to me and I'll eat my hat.

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