Sometimes I just feel that self-driving car is too in-box thinking. @boringcompany might be more practical for its top-down design that reduces computations into realistic scale. CV & Lidar are comp-expensive, not to mention the scheduling that scale with N^2.

If we add the complexity of delay control, the system will be chaotic like the failure of jurassic park. Plus, any malfunction in the system will probably be a costly issue that no society can afford.

If it's only used in out-of-city transportation, then bullet train and @hyperloop will be more appealing. Of course, I enjoy the flexible #trunk space. What if we can modularize that and make it easy to plug?

What I really want to sell here is that, road is only 2 dimensional space that has limited capacity. We should utilize the airspace! I'm not talking about #FlyingCars by @TerrafugiaInc or #JetPack. They will fall and fail. And that will scare the world like #Concorde.

And the computation scale will be no less than self-driving cars. #KardashevScale is a measure of civilization's level of technological advancement based on energy usage. We should add sub scales based on the computation usage per person. @PeterDiamandis

Okay. Back to airspace usage, we can think in these directions, 1. separate power unit and passenger space, 2. use guided rails for power unit (top-down self-drive system), 3. let passenger capsule fly like a glider towed by the power unit. @elonmusk #FutureTransportation

The benefits are, 1. safer, glider can crash land and there is also a string to hang on; 2. rail for power unit is cheap to build and maintain (the weight load will be offset by lifting); 3. modularize capsules are simple and cheap with no complex control system needed; 4. we won't need to get down to ground anymore, only way towards billion-population city built vertically; 5. easy to adopt in #SpaceSettlement, you may need this on the #MarsColony, @elonmusk; 6. inspirational and worthy to pass on to the future generation.

What else? The scale will be like 10 FLOPD (flops per day) avg before calculator invented, 10^2 FLOPD before transistors invented, then it goes viral based on Moore's law.

From radio/DVD, to gaming console/computers, until smartphone with cloud service, our consumption of computational power is increasing exponentially, even faster than Moore's law with so many #SaaS and even #HaaS, hardware as a service like what we do in MindWave.