> The problem with flying cars is the absurd fuel bills. Plus, lots of
> people don't look where the **** they're going when driving in *two*
> dimensions - imagine the carnage in 3D!

50 years ago, did any actual scientists who knew about the physics of 
planes and cars actually predict that it was likely we'd all be driving 
flying cars in 50 years? Or was it just the media and the general public 
"dreaming" of such things?

> Cars that drive themselves? Well, that's looking like it may one day be
> plausible.

Indeed, there is no reason why this shouldn't be technically plausible 
with enough computing power. The only issue I can foresee is that 
currently in most crashes the car manufacturer is not at fault, with 
self-driven cars I expect the car manufacturers will more often than not 
be liable. You're going to have to be pretty sure it won't go wrong if 
you start selling these things - one small bug could bankrupt you.

> The problem with space flight is that everything is so damned far away.
> It's been decades since anybody went to the moon, so I think people have
> forgotten this... the Apollo astronauts didn't just get into a spaceship
> and then land on the moon a few hours later. It took them *days* to get
> there! And that's just the moon, the nearest planet. It took the various
> Mars probes *months* to get there!

Today we are limited by utilising conservation of momentum and gravity 
for space travel - that's not likely to change in the next 20 years. 
Even if there is some amazing scientific breakthrough tomorrow, it will 
take many decades before that technology is reliably implemented into 
regular space travel.

> You know what? Computers that program themselves... Yeah, never
> happened.

You could argue that neural networks and other machine learning 
techniques are computers programming themselves...

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