You were promised a jetpack by liars
AIs and self-driving cars are the new jetpacks.
TONIGHT (May 17) I’m in San Francisco at the Internet Archive to keynote the tenth anniversary of the Authors Alliance.
As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes — like space colonization — have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole “we were promised jetpacks” thing.
I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment’s serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn’t want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.
Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don’t actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:
https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/
I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were “promised.” I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World’s Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan’s Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai’i:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/
Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn’t make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?
Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/
The jetpack in question — technically a “rocket belt” — was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.
It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.
And of course, the rocket belt wasn’t going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.
Once you know about the jetpack’s technical limitations, it’s obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.
Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone’s back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery’s stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.
Suitor’s interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like “a surprise is a fart with a lump in it.”
But what’s most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt’s limitations, and by callously risking Suitor’s life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.
What’s more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the “promise” of a jetpack was broken.
As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that “full self-driving is one to two years away” every year for a decade:
The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the “full self-driving” demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/
Practical rocketeering wasn’t ever “just around the corner,” because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn’t be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.
The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer’s tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber’s self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:
It’s not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8
The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it’s arguably worse than useless:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/
The centuries’ worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually “discovered” a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs
The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins
The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren’t lies, they’re premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.
This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: “Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels — but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy’s back, this thing will really take off!”
The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the “promises” of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead
They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson’s dystopian satirical “metaverse” for a roadmap:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/
As Charlie Stross writes, it’s not just that these weirdos can’t tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future — it’s also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:
Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars — showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were “promised a jetpack” in the same sense that table-rapping “spiritualists” promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:
https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/
That’s quite a supervillain origin story: “I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX.”
In other words: “Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise.”
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds
