Of course, if people had questioned the potential of flight because most of the people egging its potential was arguing that within a few years we'd no longer need cities because we'd all live wherever we wanted and whistle for the nearest mechanical bird to give us a lift, they wouldn't have been wrong to question that scenario. Even more so if discussion of powered flight was dominated by speculation about mechanical birds throwing us off cliffs if we didn't solve their alignment problems. Back in the world of AI, a spreadsheet can't even play chess, but it's a remarkably useful thing to have, has given people that used to be employed as clerks more tasks rather than less, and the person that notes how this changed everything but not at all like the futurists said it would isn't necessarily pessimistic about spreadsheets.
Powered flight is enormously useful in a lot of domains, and yet for all its obvious superiority in many dimensions it hasn't even made infantry or shipping obsolete. And if I felt like hunting, I'd probably prefer a hawk...
I'd say that people question the potential of any new technology. "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home" quote attributed to Ken Olsen of DEC is one of my favourite examples. The general aversion to change leads to deprciation/ignoring the adavantages and over-exposing of risks - just like you perfectly captured it in this passage "mechanical birds throwing us off cliffs".
> I'd say that people question the potential of any new technology.
Sure, but exaggerating the potential is much more common. Look at where people in the 50's thought we would be in terms of space or personal flying devices. This stems from both overestimating the technological capabilities, overestimating the usefulness if we were able to succeed, and failing to see the non-technological limitations.
Flight is actually a good example of the last one. For instance, the problem with Edisons prediction that people would fly to another city for a couple of hours after breakfast and be back by lunch isn't that technology isn't advanced enough. But the costs are prohibitive, the airports are often far from the city center, and even when you get to the airport it takes a couple of hours to actually get into the air.
Planes were hot, so Edison thought travelers "will largely scorn such earth crawling." But earth crawling, even long distance, is still very useful, hence the desire to invest in things like high speed rail.
It is very hard to predict the path of an S-curve. If you don't estimate when it takes off and when it slows down just right you will be way off on your view of what will happen.
Crafting arguments of the form "predicting the future is hard, as shown by this past attempt failing" can be challenging. Understanding the past, guessing at the contingency of development paths, etc.
I recall such a talk by someone respected which, IIRC, included dissing the Ladies's Home Journal 1901 "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years"'s[1] prediction "The horse will have become practically extinct." with a dismissive "The aren't!". Seeming underappreciating the time's massive horse footprint and diversity, now vanished and diminished.
> But the costs are prohibitive, [...] even when you get to the airport it takes a couple of hours to actually get into the air.
I wonder how predictions might deal with the diversity of timelines? And thus include the fork two decades back, where 9/11 didn't happen, the airline industry remained competitive, and I can still do a Boston-to-NYC short sprint from curb, across a narrow terminal, down the ramp, and squeeze through a closing airliner door, with no staff interaction beyond their shouting "run faster!". And everyone pays cash to stewardesses. And no ids (after all, showing papers to travel is an un-American Soviet thing). There's a lot of timeline diversity.
> [it] isn't that technology isn't advanced enough [...] the airports are often far from the city center
I wonder if there's a timeline where Robert Moses loved rail, smashed a straight network of lines across Long Island, and now NYC-anywhere to JFK is minutes. In contrast, there's the timeline where the massive and competitive subway construction of Edison's life, stalled out shortly after his death, and remained dead for a century. Perhaps the medieval warrens of European cities, persisting but for revolutions until aerial mass bombardment, might have been a hint. But new york was still doing massive "tear down and build new". Perhaps there's a timeline where a cold war nuclear strike on nyc cleared the way for greater development, as with the city fires of old. It does emphasize the contingency of history and thus progress, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that Edison didn't expect the trip from still-existing 1910-ish apartments in Manhattan, out to a "opened a generation after his death" Idlewild airport, to remain largely unchanged for a century. If you travel around Xmass, the train you catch might have a just-after-his-death 1932 vintage car. Current US journalism about China repeatedly reminds me of European writing from warrens about Edison's America.
Perhaps we need some expanded conceptual vocabulary for sketching possible futures?
FWIW, the eagle footage was edited to the point of disbelief, though it is sort of half real. The eagle was trained, and though wild Golden Eagles are known to attack prey up to 100lbs., they do not throw goats off cliffs nor can they carry them back to their nest. It's a shame that David Attenborough used this footage because it is bullshit.
I think you're confusing a couple of different things. The eagle goat footage from Frozen Planet was shot by Attenborough's own team. There was nothing faked about it.
There is some older footage of a similar thing but it's from a film and is all fake. The Frozen Planet footage is the first time it's been recorded for real.
There is also some Frozen Planet footage showing an eagle's view of flying over some mountains. That footage did use a trained eagle mainly because it's difficult to strap a camera to the back of a wild eagle and still have a face left.
> The eagle goat footage from Frozen Planet was shot by Attenborough's own team. There was nothing faked about it.
Attenborough does not have his own production team. Most of the footage in Frozen Planet was produced by the BBC, but not all of it. Over 30 shoots were produced locally.
The Frozen Planet golden eagle footage is mixed and contrived, and it is easy to tell by the editing. The BBC shot all in ultra high definition, and some of the footage of golden eagles is in 8K and shot with a really decent professional camera. The drone footage is of a trained eagle, otherwise it would have taken down the drone. And the footage of the eagle taking down the kid and flying with the kid (for some reason we don't see it lifting the catch, probably because it is a stuffed prop) and dropping the kid is in 1080p shot with a shitty semi-professional camera with shitty lenses, upsampled to 8K and downsampled in post, as is evident by the grain. The eagle in the nest feeding the baby is not the same eagle, and it is not feeding the baby the kid.
A falconer named Jordi Isern[1] that shoots in the Andes shot the footage of his own pet golden eagle that he trained to hunt chamois (the goats in the footage).[2] That is Isern's footage that the BBC remotely directed and later edited to mix with their own footage. Wild golden eagles do not hunt chamois, and for good reason.[3] Chamois are incredibly resilient and tough creatures, while the bones of golden eagles are hollow. The diet of golden eagles is rabbits, hares, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, marmots, fish and carrion, all of which is plentiful, so there is no reason for the grave risk of taking such large and dangerous prey.
Trained eagles will hunt anything they're trained to hunt.[4] Isern is not the first to train a golden eagle to do this. There are other falconers in California (the first to do this as a proof of concept, shot on actual film before the advent of HD video, that I can not locate, lost in Google's shitty algorithm and the noise of the Internet perhaps forever, but it exists) and Spain[5] that have done the same thing. It's such a fantastic idea that the BBC and Attenborough couldn't resist, with Attenborough rationalizing that maybe kids were prey, but not adult chamois, thus Isern was directed to show the adolescent struck rather than an adult chamois being pulled off a mountain by its horns. Wild golden eagles don't fuck around wrestling with their prey. They always kill on impact.
Those falconers suck, and it sucks the BBC and Attenborough are involved. But it's definitely bullshit.
Powered flight is enormously useful in a lot of domains, and yet for all its obvious superiority in many dimensions it hasn't even made infantry or shipping obsolete. And if I felt like hunting, I'd probably prefer a hawk...