Pivotal is taking orders 
There is a Catch-22 with technology like this: You have to bring it to
market to develop mass market operational protocols and prove them
100% safe, but you can’t bring them to market unless they are 100%
safe.
So, this is kind of my point. We’ve been working on this technology for about 100 years. Yes, early versions DO exist, and yes, you can buy one, if you have sufficient disposable income.
But it doesn’t look ANYTHING like what we’ve envisioned for the last 100 years. They’re more like personal helicopters. They’re not running on fusion, and the average consumer is FAR from being able to buy one casually just to take it around the block, the way you would test drive a Nissan. Real world flying car tech is sort of like AI: yeah, it exists, but it doesn’t work the way you think it would, or even the way you want it to.
In all fairness, what present day tech perfectly matches its counterpart in sci-fi of yesteryear? The PADD of TNG era Star Trek probably comes closer to being a match for a modern tablet than a lot of 20th Century Sci-Fi versions of 21st century tech, but take a look at say, the Jetsons and compare their video phones with modern video chating, Rudy with Siri, Alexa, and whatever the AI assistant on Android is called, Rosie with a Roomba, Elroy’s TV watch wih a modern smart watch(also, the Pokegear and Poketch from gens 2 and 4 of Pokemon)… Granted, the Jetsons is set in the 2060s, so plenty of time for roombas to grow into all purpose robot maids, but some of the future tech the Jetsons predicted legitimately looks outdated compared to real world versions.
Though, on the safety side of things… Honestly, if the bicycle were invented today, I doubt it would get past the product safety red tape. Sure, there were some crazy dangerous things the lax safety guidelines of the past let through to market, but I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that we over corrected and went from being too lax about safety to being too restrictive about safety, excluding a few things that are still dangerous, but which were deemed too useful to ban(such as traditional cars, probably the most dangerous object the average American touches regularly without thinking about the reality of how dangerous it is… protip vehicular deaths outnumber homicides by a wide margin), so it isn’t enough that a new form of transportation be safer than what it could potentially replace, it has to be impossibly safe.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pre-internet kind of nailed the Wiki concept.
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Sometimes a technology sounds cool, but only because nobody seriously sat down and thought about the downsides.
No sane person should want flying cars; road-bound cars are bad enough. We can barely handle the air traffic we have now without dealing with literally millions more. Imagine the sky being full of hurtling tons of metal being flown by the same people that drive drunk, or while looking at their phone, or road raging, etc. You get the idea. That’s before you even get to the issues of fuel, pollution, thrown items, and risk of random “cars” crashing through your roof every Saturday night… There are too many places in the U.S. you can’t walk across town without a good chance of being annihilated by a car. Yeah, let’s expand that to the sky!
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Mostly harmless.
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My take is that nobody is sitting down and creating new regulations just for the fun of it. New regulations are written in blood; they generally come about when enough people are dying or getting maimed that legislators can’t ignore the problem any longer.
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Forget getting across town, I can’t walk past the end of my own driveway without walking into traffic… Now, maybe the traffic in the trailer park is light enoughthat wolking in the street isn’t too dangerous if you know the layout of the park or can see where you’re going, but the trailer park is also an Island and the road connecting it to the rest of this small town is about halfway between a main city thoroughfare and he highway… And we’re only about 12 feet above sea level, so there are drainage ditches everywhere, often with little or no solid ground between the edge of the asphalt and the ditch bank. Personally, I blame a century of bad urban planning that prioritized the convenience of motorists to the detriment of everyone else.
And honestly, I’m probably lumping publicperception into that regulation bucket. I agree flying cars are probably a bad idea in reality, but lets look at self driving cars: As I understand it, the statistics we have collected so far suggest that self-driving cars, at least in the environments they have been deployed, have already vastly outdone humandrivers in the safety department, but vehicular crashes involving self-driving cars make national news and make people fearful of the tech, while everyone is numb or ignorant to the fact that human error causes hundreds of crashes every. single. day.
Also, I’d argue even traditional cars are too expensive for the average person to afford. Then again, I’m of the opinion that if the only way you can obtain something is by taking on debt, than you can’t actually afford that thing and that the mark of a person truly living within their means is being completely debt free.
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It’s like the game Civilization: Beyond Earth where there are different cultural affinities pertaining to attitudes toward technology that the space colony can level up in – A: a traditionalist one, where you have the powerful tech you need to supply but you maintain the patterns of life and societal construction from legacy Earth, B: a cyberpunk-AI one where people use compute to transcend legacy biological and societal limitations, and C: a ecological integration one where bioengineering accelerates human evolution to produce harmony with new environments.
What kind of sci-fi future do we want? Dune is mostly A with some C while explicitly killing B.
Cars and LLMs are already in this discussion. Society built for cars is already a point toward B and a detriment to C (and maybe a smaller detriment to A). What about LLMs? On their own, without some of the things that AI futurists and Singularitarians have been proclaiming like neural implants etc., I don’t think they necessarily set us on course for fully realized B or reduce our capacity for A or C.
Even more than flying cars, talking tech is a basic thing that we have always imagined being able to do; arguably I would say it’s an even more trad and basic impulse than science fiction altogether, due to the tendency to anthropomorphize things, then tendency to narrate our lives and expect things to speak back to us.
I think most would agree.
In other words, AI (LLM use) is only as helpful or harmful and we choose it to be.
One road to harming society is to stop being critical of AI use and embrace the surface level benefits and having those become foundations to build upon.
Conversely, I think the path to helping society is a policy of augmenting over that of replacing in areas where we value creativity, critical thinking, communication, etc.
A possible example of that augmenting is a local painter who does “fantasy” landscape (and sometime portrait) paintings. Who uses generative “AI” to create samples of things they might want to paint, that the painter then uses as inspiration for elements in their own original works.
eg. they use the “AI” to augment / enhance their own imagination.
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Recently I tried out an online course that uses AI grading. In theory, I like the idea of this because I know how it feels to have the workload of 200 student papers to grade. But the results… well, you can just see for yourself.
Prompt: Write a 250-word discussion guide introducing The Great Gatsby to a book club. Include two questions that use the novel’s biographical context, two questions that invite readers to reflect on their first impressions of the book, and a brief note on how you might address readers who are skeptical that this is a ‘gangster novel.’
My response:
1.) It is said that “great artists steal.” According to professor Fullington, F. Scott Fitzgerald actually was accused of plagiarism by Zelda Sayre and others. But this is usually not what we mean when we repeat the famous dictum. If Fitzgerald is a great artist, then he “stole” in a more abstract sense. Artists take sources and filter them through their own experiences and perspectives. They “put their stink on it,” if you will. Based on the biographical context of the novel and the first two chapters, what aspects of this book might be “stolen”, and from what?
2.) Fitzgerald never realized that The Great Gatsby would become a classic, but in fact saw it as an “experimental” work. What aspects of the writing strike you as experimental? Are there paragraphs that seem a bit more inscrutable than others? Where are these paragraphs and what could the author be meaning to do by writing in this way?
3.) The screenwriter Bob Byington remarked that the book is a “reflection of a culture relieved at a return to prosperity which relies on the exploitation of less developed countries.” How many references to this “prosperity” do you notice in the first two chapters? How often does class come up as an issue? Does it strike you that the book is complacent about this classism, or is another reading more supportable?
4.) One of my favorite aspects of the book is the dialogue. Pick an example of dialogue from this book and explain what it shows about the characters in question. Can you imagine yourself at one of these social gatherings, and how do you think you would get along with one or more of these characters?
I would note that at this point in the reading, there is not yet any indication that The Great Gatsby is a gangster novel. Gatsby himself has only been spoken about by other characters and observed from afar by Nick. It was remarked that his wealth came from his relation to Kaiser Wilhelm. It is true that Tom Buchannan mistreats women in a way similar to what you would see in a gangster movie like Goodfellas. But this type of behavior is hardly specific to gangsterism. We will have to read on before making a final judgment on this.
AI Response:
”You raise several rich lines of inquiry, but the submission does not fully meet the structural requirements for question types and coverage. You clearly include at least two questions grounded in biographical or contextual material (for example, about what might be “stolen” and what seems experimental), and you invite readers to reflect on their impressions of dialogue and social gatherings. However, the prompt specifically asks for two questions that explicitly invite readers to reflect on their *personal* first impressions of the book, and two questions that explicitly address readers skeptical that this is a gangster novel. In your response, the first-impression dimension is more implied than directly asked, and skepticism about the gangster label is handled in a closing note rather than through distinct, clearly interrogative questions. To improve, you could rework or add questions that explicitly ask readers about their own first reactions and that directly engage skeptical readers with the gangster-fiction angle.
You do a thoughtful job of framing the discussion by invoking ideas about artistic “theft,” experimentation, prosperity, and class, which gives a book club useful conceptual entry points. You also include a clear note at the end about how, at this stage of the reading, there is not yet evidence that the novel is a gangster story, and you mention Tom’s behavior and Gatsby’s rumored connection to Kaiser Wilhelm. However, the note stays mostly at the level of general skepticism and does not yet name or anticipate specific gangster or crime-related elements (such as bootlegging or organized crime figures) or outline a concrete strategy for guiding skeptical readers later. To strengthen this, you could more explicitly connect future crime-related aspects of the text to a plan for discussion, so the note functions as a targeted strategy rather than just a caveat.
Your response shows strong engagement with the novel, but as a *discussion guide* it has some structural issues. You meet the length requirement and your prose is clear and readable, but the questions are embedded in long, run-on paragraphs without visual separation or a clearly marked introductory section followed by distinct questions. For a facilitator, it would be harder to quickly locate and use each question in a live setting. To improve, you could more clearly separate an opening framing paragraph from the questions, and then break the questions into distinct, easily scannable units (for example, with line breaks or numbering) so the guide functions more practically for a book club.”
Grade: F
My response to this is that the AI didn’t really make me feel like I actually failed. It’s focusing on “structural” issues as opposed to what I think a real English teacher would be more concerned about, which is thoughtfulness and engagement with the novel. Also, it incorrectly read the directions. It doesn’t ask for 2 questions responding to skepticism that this is a gangster novel, it asks for 2 questions relating to biographical context an 2 questions about first impressions.
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One flaw with AI is if you give AI a “book” it knows the entirety of the work from beginning to end as soon as its loaded it. There’s no perception of how humans absorb a story as the writer has written it.
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Indeed, and that very much goes back to what I mentioned upthread: AI has no notion of causality. And if you struggle with temporal causality, you do struggle with narrative logic. Or, put more precisely, to an AI, the beginning of the book and the end of the book exist simultaneously in its memory space, bypassing the linear passage of time required to experience causal consequences.
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that’s how the Tralfamadorians read right?
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