Larry Page's Flying Car Failure Is a Lesson For Us All

tech.hindustantimes.com:

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.

Technology isn't moving in the direction that we expect.

The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel highlighted the banality of tech's evolution when he said in 2013 that, “We wanted flying cars, and got 140 characters instead,” referring to the then-character limit for tweets.

In the 20th century, people viewed the future through the exciting lens of science fiction: robot housekeepers from the Jetsons; or glass-domed houses and “meal pills” from the 1950s comic strip, “Closer Than We Think;” or flying cars from Back To The Future II.

But predicting the path of technology is hard when our only reference point is the present, hence why Marty McFly used a fax machine in the film's future world, and why Arthur Radebaugh's 1950s comics featured items like paper and pens for writing “electronic Christmas cards.” Back then, the concept of digital