71–80 of 101 posts
It’s sad to see America fighting over old manufacturing jobs while China is leaping ahead. It used to be the other way round. I hope America goes back to its previous innovation cycle
An IRL Youtuber streamer recently tried one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQGAuf0rFLA Might be a bit of a stretch to call these "taxi"s but anyway here's your futuristic flying car from China...
The fact that it actually exists and can be demoed is pretty impressive.
It is both amazing and sad to see China is literally in the future compared to the US in terms of infrastructure and social development. A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now. The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable. In comparasion, the streets of SF, one of the crown jewels of the US technosphere, are just so "normal" I find…
Hope this doesn't take off (kek), EVs have made PRC cities increasingly tranquil, dealing with rotors would be huge step down in QoL. Fine for quick transit across water. That said, maybe they can optimize for size:volume. it would actually be pretty good to displace delivery network from ground level. Maybe even straight to 40th storey balcony / living room delivery sometime.
Ideal use case seems like medical. Air taxi someone directly to the hospital as fast as possible.
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Can you expand on how you reason it would be easier?
everything with a mass over 1kg+- in the air, is carrying a "gps" and something that is transmitting its location, and all air traffic world wide is(theoreticaly) assigned a flight path for each trip,witha specific flight level, ie: the planning is 3d, so the density per layer, never gets very high, and there are specific paths taken to change layers, there are never any dogs, or horses, or people trying to deek, the…
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Can you tell me more? I visited Shenzhen few months ago and wasn't that astonished. Pretty normal city. Well, I was surprised about few things, like overall lack of traffic jams in the 17-million city, roads seems to be well planned, but I could just be lucky. And that's me coming from Kazakhstan, which is not exactly first-world country. Life seems kind of the same, taxi apps, map with reviews, delivery guys, etc. A…
The problem is the many cities in the West are objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world, so many people who don't have that global perspective come to China and think "it's so futuristic" or so, when in reality it's something that has been achieved elsewhere decades ago and China is just one in the line of a common trend. Even when others in this thread say cities like Singapore or Hong Kong are…
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Is there hard evidence of this beyond random anecdotes? Genuinely curious as I haven't visited there.
Have you been to SF? It’s like a zombie movie with shocking public transport. There are many nicer cities which seem futuristic compared to SF. I’ve not been to a Chinese metropolis but if you just look at some photos it wouldn’t be hard to imagine somewhere like Shenzhen being much further ahead.
It is both amazing and sad to see China is literally in the future compared to the US in terms of infrastructure and social development. A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now. The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable. In comparasion, the streets of SF, one of the crown jewels of the US technosphere, are just so "normal" I find…
To be fair, it's usually easier to build state of the art, when you start from scratch. Western countries have a big legacy they build decades ago, which has to be used and maintained for decades to justify the investment.
And as a visitor, it's also more likely to only see the fancy parts, and not be confronted with the dark parts, especially when you have a strong leader who's dedicated goal is to sell a positive view of the country.
I definitely don't want to belittle the achievement, but I would imagine that creating safe self-driving helicopters is much easier than creating safe self-driving cars. (At least as long as the skies are just as empty as they are today. Once it's full of things like the roads, that will be a different topic)
1 word: birds. Anyway, detecting and avoiding obstacles should be in the menu. Maybe not as complex as at street level with people and cars doing unexpected things, but maybe with some added complexity that need to have into account like weather, inertia and things near landing sites.
I’m currently in a part of the world where helicopter delivery is so cheap and common that locals are complaining. “It should be more expensive…” someone told me last autumn. The helicopters (and drones!) are loud and annoying. Until these problems are solved, locals will resist converting all airspace into the equivalent of a loud, high-speed roadway.