Mack, a thoughtful and well-written response as always. How are you? There is a house for sale in my neighborhood. You and the family could move in and be just a few doors down from George and Jamie Edwards, the Vikings Defensive Coordinator! Seriously, they are renting the house next door to us; I chatted with them at a garage sale last Saturday. Very nice people. he thinks very highly of Todd Gurley and what the Rams have done on defense this offseason.
I think fully autonomous electric vehicles will have no more than a niche in the transportation system for the foreseeable future, and I mean for decades to come. Too many costly obstacles that need to be addressed by governments at all levels. Check out this article from a few years ago. Personal rapid transit was thought to be the cutting edge of public transportation, but there were too many issues for it to be anything more than a novelty.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/0...sit-is-probably-never-going-to-happen/380467/
Well, the move to Minny is off, but thanks for thinking of me.
I agree that pods on rails probably isn’t going to be the future, but fully autonomous electric vehicles are already here and in our environment.
People thought VCRs would be a niche market.
AT&T famously commissioned a study in 1980 by McKinsey and Co about cell phone adoption by the year 2000. They guessed 900k. The actual number was 109M.
The conventional wisdom was that HD streaming wouldn’t be a thing because there wasn’t enough broadband capacity. Now, we’re seeing the death of physical media like CDs, DVD and even Blu-Ray.
The list is long of the tech that people couldn’t envision changing everything only to look back and realize that once the tech is adopted, people can’t imagine being without it.
I mean once you could get kids movies on VCR, what parent wanted to take their young kids to the movies? Once cell phones became affordable, who wanted to keep a pocket of change and grab a public phone handle the that likely had urine and tetanus on it?
I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but nothing will look the same in 20 years just like nothing looks the same as it did in 1998. Some things remain similar and others look radically different even if one discounts hair styles and fashion.
Oh and it’s a fun conversation.
