I was up this morning bright and early and started sifting through my twitter feed as I usually do, and one story that stuck out was an article from the Economist about the rate of innovation. In it the writer mentions Peter Thiel’s disappointment over the pace of innovation and seeks to refute this claim and the related claims of technological pessimists everywhere. Specifically Thiel mentions the example of flying cars. After years of conceptualizing and dreaming about them they still haven’t become a mass consumer product. Whenever I hear complaints like Thiel’s, the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men pops into my head. It’s a crude analogy, but it’s an entertaining caricature of why some technology comes to fruition faster than others. There’s a very good reason we don’t have flying cars. We want flying cars, but we can’t handle flying cars. We just aren’t ready.
