Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Silicon Valley: Conjuring up a Popular Mechanics dream world for the 21st century (update)

 

Headline:  Washington Post
For a project so ambitious, the announcement about the end of flying-car startup Kitty Hawk Corp. was surprisingly terse. A single post on the company’s LinkedIn page on Wednesday stated: “We have made the decision to wind down Kittyhawk. We’re still working on the details of what’s next.” 
The news was greeted with surprise by rival companies. Founded in 2010, Kittyhawk figured out early that it needed to make an aircraft as nimble as a car, rather than bolt some wings on an automobile. It helped pioneer a new type of aircraft called eVTOL, or electric vertical takeoff and landing — essentially a cross between a drone and a light aircraft — and hopes ran high when the deep-pocketed Google co-founder Larry Page came on board. 
The dream wasn’t to be. Details on what went wrong for Kittyhawk have not been made public, but there are at least three sobering lessons to glean from its closure.
 
Original 1/22/2022 post starts here

New York Times, 1/24/2022
But more than two years after Google’s announcement, the world is still waiting for a quantum computer that actually does something useful. And it will most likely wait much longer. The world is also waiting for self-driving cars, flying cars, advanced artificial intelligence and brain implants that will let you control your computing devices using nothing but your thoughts.


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