Marty will be here soon. Do we have all the tech he needs?

Displayed at the 2015 Hill Valley retro auto show

I like writing about self-driving vehicles, drone deliveries, 3D printing, and other technology that has great potential to shape our future. Occasionally however, I like to look back at how today was conceptualized by generations before ours. One great example of this was released in the form of a film known as Back to the Future II. When Marty arrived in October 21st, 2015 the setting was quite a bit off from what we will really see on that day. Let us take a look at some of the predictions made by that film and how close they actually came.

Flying Cars

Doc, Marty, and Jennifer arrive in 2015 on a skyway. A skyway appears to be an interstate in the sky which flying cars can use to more efficiently travel longer distances. Flying cars were not conceptualized by the Back to the Future writers. In 1962 the animated series, The Jetsons, traveled by flying cars. Every kid growing up in that era knew that by the time they were adults, flying cars would be ubiquitous. Perhaps the culture that was started with The Jetsons is the main reason that many times when someone expresses disappointment of the present, they commonly utter the phrase, “Where’s my flying car?”

In 1940 Henry Ford, of Ford Motor Company fame, said, “Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.” Where are we on Ford’s promise?

Of note are the Moller Skycar M400 and the Xplorair PX200. Both of these are what is known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. The Xplorair is a single seat aircraft, while the Moller can accommodate up to four people. Moller states that the skycar is “an aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter, is able to fly at high speed, yet also able to travel at low speed on the ground and narrow enough to fit on urban streets.” The Moller uses rotary engines, unlike the Xplorair which takes advantage of the Coandă effect to propel itself into the air. The Xplorair has been funded by the Government of France and is scheduled for a drone flight in 2017 at the Paris Air Show and commercialization thereafter.

As you can see there are challenges to creating flying cars. Engineering something that is going to be practical takes time. But we haven’t given up yet and maybe by the time we get there we will even have flying cars that drive themselves!

Auto-Lacing Shoes

In 2015 Marty looks very out of place in his 1985 style. So Doc gets him some more current apparel including the Nike Air Mag shoes. So do we have Nike Air Mags today? Well, sort of. You can get a pair of officially licensed Nike Air Mags from an online costume shop for around $100. However you will be disappointed to find that there is no auto-lacing technology in these shoes. But, hey, they have functioning lights!

So what hope do we have for auto-lacing shoes? Well there is a company called Powerlace who have designed an auto-lacing shoe that works simply by pressing your heel down to tighten the auto-lacing. The problem is that their Kickstarter campaign never got fully funded and so it remains to be seen whether Powerlace will ever release a product.

The other, perhaps more promising, hope comes as a confirmation from Nike designer Tinker Hatfield who reportedly said that his team is working on delivering a Nike MAG with Power Laces sometime in 2015. The year is quickly slipping away, but maybe we will see them. I wonder if this would be more of a case of Back to the Future inspiring the future than predicting it, however.

Hoverboards

When Marty runs into Biff’s grandson, Griff, he manages to anger the violent psychopath and “borrows” a hoverboard to escape. Griff follows him on his own, more featured hoverboard which was jet powered. Not knowing that hoverboards would not work on water without jet power he was stuck and so to escape Griff he jumps off causing Griff and the gang to crash into the courthouse. Griff was arrested and Marty got away.

If you want something that looks more or less exactly like the board that Marty hovered around on in the movie, you are in luck. That product does exist today. When it was originally released, it cost a mere $120. That sounds like a pretty good deal for a hoverboard until you realize that it is a prop replica and is little more than a plastic board. It does not hover. Every once in awhile I see these things around. But then I am the type of person who hangs out at geek conventions where there are souped-up DeLoreans made to look like a Back to the Future time machine. I usually see the hoverboard sitting in the back seat next to the flux capacitor.

As far as an actually functioning hoverboard, there have been several attempts. As far back as the 1950s the Hiller Flying Platform was a hovercraft which was quite a bit more cumbersome than anything similar to a skateboard, but did accomplish the task of propelling a person in the air in a sort of hovering effect pretty early on. Jamie Hyneman built a makeshift hovercraft for MythBusters, dubbed the Hyneman Hoverboard. It was made using a surfboard and leafblower, but was still not very practical.

The closest that we have gotten is the Hendo Hoverboard created by a company called Arx Pax. The boards use magnetic field architecture technology to work. To the recreational hoverboarder all you need to know is that it requires a special surface to operate. According to Arx Pax: “Hoverboards have been in high demand since their launch in October 2014. Building Hoverparks and retro-fitting skateboard parks will soon be underway for this new sport to take flight.” There has also been a press release from the company just today that a next generation of their hoverboard will be unveiled on October 21st. This new version will supposedly feature a more skateboard-like design and feel and was collaborated on with famed skateboard guy, Tony Hawk.

So I guess we sort of have hoverboards now.

All of these advances are still far from commonplace though as depicted in the film. The challenges with these ideas are many and while we are forever trying to be inspired by our science fiction dreams of the future, reality always has laws that limit the extent to which we can reach them. But still we try and eventually we come up with some pretty interesting uses of technology. Some of which past fictional ideas never could have thought of.

Lastly, if you want to see a pretty funny fan-fiction comedy of Marty and Doc coming to the real October 21, 2015, I encourage you to check out College Humor’s: Back To The Future In ACTUAL 2015.

(ed note: Some non-tech predictions. Back to the Future predicted a Cubs World Series win. Is it going to happen? Universal also released a preview for Jaws 19, go check it out).

Kirk Aug

Kirk is waiting for his automatic drying jacket to turn on. He got all wet when his wheeled hoverboard ran him into a creek. Follow Kirk on twitter @kirkaug.

Welcome to the Future: Kirk looks at self driving cars Part 2

The new Tesla? Code named T-Edsel?

This is a follow up to part 1 of Kirk's look at self driving cars.

I cannot say I particularly enjoy driving. I enjoy the convenience that comes with driving. I like being able to go anywhere I please at a near whim. But the experience could be improved as far as I am concerned. I could find better use of my time than staring at the road. Sometimes, if I have the extra time, I take public transportation because it is not the commute that I dislike, but the bore of it. I love to have the opportunity to read a book or interact with my partner or my kids while I get to my destination. The passengers of the vehicle that I pilot get this. The technology is soon here for me to get this too. And it can be public transportation but with the same privacy I now enjoy. When thinking about self-driving vehicles, these are some of the ideas that delight me.

How about I start with the public transportation aspect. As of right now, if I want a fast way to get to my destination I need to own my vehicle. This means several things. I need to have insurance. I need licenses. One for myself to drive and one for the vehicle to be on the road. I need to have a place to put this vehicle when I am not using it, which happens to be the vast majority of the time that I own it. I need to maintain it; gas, oil changes, and the like.

Contrarily, once self-driving vehicles are widespread, I no longer need to own the vehicle. Transportation will be a front door service and it will be much faster, cheaper, and more versatile than taxi cabs currently are. There will probably be periodic rates for frequent users to benefit from. I need to run to the store because I forgot the milk? A couple of smart phone taps and I will have a vehicle in my driveway within minutes. This comes with exactly the same privacy that I already have with my own vehicle and with the other aspects of owning a vehicle obscured into the cost of the transport and taking no physical effort on my part. Because we do not pay a driver, this will cost less than a cab. The economic implications are definitely something to consider here, but I will wait for another post to get more into that.

Another thing that excites me is the environmental impact. Once the use of public self-driving vehicles is set in we can start making all sorts of cuts in where we currently have waste in exchange for convenience. One example is that it is no longer going to be one vehicle taking you or your party everywhere. Right now I drive a SUV, but I am no where near using all the space and power that requires a SUV every time I drive. Many times it is just me. Cut to the self-driving vehicle service, and I can specify exactly how many seats and storage I will need. Getting groceries? A one seat vehicle with enough storage for a bag or two will do. Going on a date? A two seater with no storage works. Family vacation? Four seats and lots of storage. Taking the dogs along? Special storage options available. A lot less energy wasted. I could go on.

An added energy benefit is the fact that a human is not navigating. Some drivers are certainly more efficient than others, but all of us are have emotions. Those emotions necessarily affect our driving. We misjudge how much time we have we have to make the gap, then in attempt to recover we slam on the gas. We switch back and forth between lanes in a jam on nothing more than a hunch wasting countless energy. Not only can computer give up the emotional aspect of driving, but the can also communicate telepathically. Self-driving vehicles can communicate with other self-driving vehicles in a way humans never can. Need to merge? There is no guesswork, just a seamless merge. Traffic jams on the interstate? Reroute X number of vehicles to a secondary route.

The last benefit I want to address in this post is the additional freedom of the youth of tomorrow. Say your ten year old wants to go to a friend’s house but there is no one to provide the ride. With a self-driving vehicle service, there is.

This may scare some parents. I certainly know more than a few parents who want to keep their kids locked down as much as they can for as long as they can. For these parents, there will probably be ways to secure the service to only be used with particular amounts of permission. There will also be kids who get around this as they always is with technology lockout systems. (Another topic for another post I suppose.) And sure I think that a certain show of responsibility should exist before a kid can set out in a self-driving vehicle alone, but this takes down a lot of barriers to those kids who are deserving of that responsibility. They do not really need to be responsible enough to drive a vehicle in order to benefit from the geographical freedoms associated with it.

How do you feel? Are you excited about the changes to our world that self-driving vehicles might mean? Are you concerned about some of the details that have yet to emerge into our collective consciousness? Let’s discuss it.

Kirk Aug

Kirk is getting settled into his virtual cubicle of internet journalism. He is looking for ideas on other near future technologies that will change your life. Follow him on twitter @kirkaug 

Welcome to the Future: Kirk looks at self driving cars Part 1

Art department discovered stock photos

Welcome to the Future is SeedSing's look at trends and technology that are shaping the world we will live in. Submit ideas of interesting sociological or scientific ideas that are altering our current lives to seedsing.rdk@gmail.com .

We are quickly coming to a point in time when vehicles will be driven by computers in addition to humans. Once this point comes and takes hold, it seems the vehicles that are driven by humans will be the biggest safety risk on the road.

As many are aware, Google has been testing self-driving vehicles for six years and counting. The vehicles have driven about 1.9 million miles since they hit the road and have not caused any collisions. Of the 14 collisions that they were involved in, 11 were caused by human drivers rear ending the robot vehicles. Although, I am not sure that you would get that impression if you happen to merely skim the tech news headlines.

Every time that I hear about one of Google’s vehicles being involved in an accident, before reading the article, I am tempted to think that Google’s vehicle must have caused the accident. For what other reason would the involvement of a self-driving vehicle warrant a mention in the headline?

The following are examples of headlines related to the most recent such accident: “Google Self-Driving Car Involved in First Injury Accident” - ABC News. “Google self-driving car has 1st accident causing injuries” - CBC News. “Google Sees First Injury Accident for Self-Driving Cars” - TIME. “Injuries in Google self-driving car accident” - CNN Money.

If the self-driving capability is not an element in the accident, as has been the case in all incidences with these vehicles, I am having trouble coming up with a reason for them to be part of the story at all. It nearly always seems that once I get past the headline, the story is much more of a couple sentences in the weekly accident report of the local newspaper. Something like: “Rear end accident on 12th & Maple. Minor injuries.” That’s the whole story.

So why do we add in the part about the self-driving vehicle getting hit and expand it to a full article? And why do we often have a vaguely suggestive headline about Google to go with it? My suspicion is clickbait. If there is a way to squeeze an element of fear into a headline, people are more likely to click. New technology, as with any change, is scary. Handing over control of our transportation to a machine that has been proving itself to do a better job than humans is degrading. Many humans want to think they are superior to the machines. They want to believe that the machines will fail. They do not see the machines as an extension of ourselves, but a scary other to fear and conquer.

This fear is only human. These machines, while built by humans who are specialists in building and programming machines, are meant to be used by humans who do not understand them. There is a big divide here and the only way it will be overcome is through time. Just as historically with any new technology, time will bring comfort. People will start to see the convenience and benefit over their fears. They will start to understand it better and trust it more. In fact, as baiting as these headlines may be, those who do actually read the article are going to keep seeing this new era of self-driving vehicles to be safer.

I am not saying that self-driving vehicles are perfect and the day will not come when a self-driving vehicle will be the cause of an accident. I expect that it will. To some, I am sure, that will be all that it takes to dismiss those vehicles entirely. It is my hope, however, that the majority will see some of the major benefits to be gained from these vehicles. It is for those reasons that I am excited. You can read more about that in the second part of my musings on this topic tomorrow. (Read Part 2 here)

Kirk Aug

Kirk is still excited about the New Horizons data. His excitement has led him to be the point person on SeedSing science and technology insights. Follow him on twitter @KirkAug