[johnnyanmac]

I don't think Jetpacks are even in step one. Tech's been there but I don't think any are commercially available. They've certainly been hyped for decades, but more in the same way most sci-fi concepts are glamorized in general. Worldwide instant communication was very much a sci-fi concept 50 years ago, and today it's definitely not all rainbows and butterflies

[TeMPOraL]

Jetpacks aren't here because they're fundamentally incompatible with real-world society. Imagine giving a typical driver a jetpack or a flying car, and then think about how a traffic accident would play out.

Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.

That's the overall problem with all the cool sci-fi tech - it's cool in an action movie, when the protagonists are the only ones who get to use it. It stops being cool and becomes either useless or dangerous, once every rando gets to use it in their daily lives.

[lmm]

> Jetpacks aren't here because they're fundamentally incompatible with real-world society. Imagine giving a typical driver a jetpack or a flying car, and then think about how a traffic accident would play out.

Oh yeah, imagine a transportation technology that killed people every week. No way that would be legal. Except if it's cars, for some reason they magically get a pass.

> Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.

We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would still have a lower death rate than the regular kind. But they can't replicate the "our oopsies are someone else's problem" field that cars have. That's the hard part.

[TeMPOraL]

> Oh yeah, imagine a transportation technology that killed people every week. No way that would be legal. Except if it's cars, for some reason they magically get a pass.

Imagine a transportation technology that killed orders of magnitude more of people every week. That's the reality if you just magically s/car/jetpack/g for everyone.

> We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would still have a lower death rate than the regular kind.

Not really. Driving a car is trivial compared to flying a helicopter; the hoops in question are mostly about ensuring pilots are properly trained (vs. half-ass bullshit trained, "you'll learn the real thing on the road" that is getting a driver's license) and actually meet some health standards. Number and difficulty of hoops differ in various areas of aviation, but they all recognize just how much easier it is to kill yourself with an aircraft, and how much more death and destruction an aircraft can cause.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Imagine a transportation technology that killed orders of magnitude more of people every week. That's the reality if you just magically s/car/jetpack/g for everyone.

Where is the problem: those people who don't have this risk affinity don't need to buy/use a jetpack. Similarly, not everybody should go ice climbing or BASE jumping. Thus I see no reason to outlaw jetpacks just because of their danger.

[TeMPOraL]

They're not outlawed per se. They just don't make sense at the intersection of economics and safety regulation, which is why you don't see them outside some experimental work.

[Terr_]

> Imagine giving a typical driver a jetpack or a flying car, and then think about how a traffic accident would play out.

Yeah, even with a bunch of safety features... Well, this Mitchell & Webb skit sums up the human-factor. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDIojhOkV4w