Many of you could ask the question, you know, why is a flying car, or maybe more accurately, a roadable aircraft, possible at this time?
A number of years ago, Mr. Ford predicted that flying cars of some form would be available.
Now, 60 years later, I'm here to tell you why it's possible.
When I was about five years old, not very much -- about a year after Mr. Ford made his predictions, I was living in a rural part of Canada, on the side of a mountain in a very isolated area.
Getting to school, for a kid that was actually pretty short for his age, through the Canadian winter, was not a pleasant experience.
It was a trying and scary thing for a young kid to be going through.
At the end of my first year in school, in the summer of that year, I discovered a couple hummingbirds that were caught in a shed near my home.
They'd worn themselves out, beating themselves against the window, and, well, they were easy to capture.
I took them outside and as I let them go, that split second, even though they were very tired, that second I let them go they hovered for a second, then zipped off into the distance.
I thought, what a great way to get to school.
(Laughter) For a kid at that age, this was like infinite speed, disappearing, and I was very inspired by that.
And so the next -- over the next six decades, believe it or not, I've built a number of aircraft, with the goal of creating something that could do for you, or me, what the hummingbird does, and give you that flexibility.
I've called this vehicle, generically, a volantor, after the Latin word "volant," meaning, to fly in a light, nimble manner.
Volantor-like helicopter, perhaps.
The FAA, the controlling body above all, calls it a "powered lift aircraft."
And they've actually issued a pilot's license -- a powerlift pilot's license -- for this type of aircraft.
It's closer than you think.
It's kind of remarkable when you consider that there are no operational powered lift aircraft.
So for once, perhaps, the government is ahead of itself.
The press calls my particular volantor a "Skycar."
This is a little bit earlier version of it, that's why it's given the X designation, but it's a four-passenger aircraft that could take off vertically, like a helicopter -- therefore it doesn't need an airfield.
On the ground, it's powered electrically.
It's actually classified as a motorcycle because of the three wheels, which is a great asset because it allows you, theoretically, to use this on the highways in most states, and actually in all cities.
So that's an asset because if you've got to deal with the crash protection issues of the automobile, forget it -- you're never going to fly it.
(Laughter) One could say that a helicopter does pretty much what the hummingbird does, and gets around in much the same way, and it's true, but a helicopter is a very complex device.
It's expensive -- so expensive that very few people could own or use it.
It's often been described because of its fragile nature and its complexity, as a series of parts -- a large number of parts -- flying in formation.
(Laughter) Another difference, and I have to describe this, because it's very personal, another great difference between the helicopter and the volantor -- in my case the Skycar volantor -- is the experience that I've had in flying both of those.
In a helicopter you feel -- and it's still a remarkable sensation -- you feel like you're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane.
When you get in the Skycar -- and I can tell you, there's only one other person that's flown it, but he had the same sensation -- you really feel like you're being lifted up by a magic carpet, without any vibration whatsoever.
The sensation is unbelievable.
And it's been a great motivator.
I only get to fly this vehicle occasionally, and only when I can persuade my stockholders to let me do so, but it's still one of those wonderful experiences that reward you for all that time.
What we really need is something to replace the automobile for those 50-plus mile trips.
Very few people realize that 50 mile-plus trips make up 85 percent of the miles traveled in America.
If we can get rid of that, then the highways will now be useful to you, as contrasted by what's happening in many parts of the world today.
On this next slide, is an interesting history of what we really have seen in infrastructure, because whether I give you a perfect Skycar, the perfect vehicle for use, it's going to have very little value to you unless you've got a system to use it in.
I'm sure any of you have asked the question, yeah, are there great things up there -- what am I going to do, get up there?
It's bad enough on a highway, what's it going to be like to be in the air?
This world that you're going to be talking about tomorrow is going to be completely integrated.
You're not going to be a pilot, you're going to be a passenger.
And it's the infrastructure that really determines whether this process goes forward.
I can tell you, technically we can build Skycars -- my God, we went to the moon!
The technology there was much more difficult than what I'm dealing with here.
But we have to have these priority changes, we have to have infrastructure to go with this.
Historically you see that we got around 200 years ago by canals, and as that system disappeared, were replaced by railroads.
As that disappeared we came in with highways.
But if you look at that top corner -- the highway system -- you see where we are today.
Highways are no longer being built, and that's a fact.
You won't see any additional highways in the next 10 years.
However, the next 10 years, if like the last 10 years, we're going to see 30 percent more traffic.
And where is that going to lead you to?
So the issue then, I've often asked, is when is it going to happen?
When are we going to be able to have these vehicles?
And of course, if you ask me, I'm going to give you a really optimistic view.
After all, I've been spending 60 years here believing it's going to happen tomorrow.
So, I'm not going to quote myself on this.
I'd prefer to quote someone else, who testified with me before Congress, and in his position as head of NASA put forward this particular vision of the future of this type of aircraft.
Now I would argue, actually, if you look at the fact that on the highways today, you're only averaging about 30 miles per hour -- on average, according to the DOT -- the Skycar travels at over 300 miles an hour, up to 25,000 feet.
And so, in effect, you could see perhaps a tenfold increase in the ability to get around as far as speed is concerned.
Unbeknownst to many of you, the highway in the sky that I'm talking about here has been under construction for 10 years.
It makes use of the GPS -- you're familiar with GPS in your automobile, but you may not be familiar with the fact that there's a GPS U.S., there's a Russian GPS, and there's a new GPS system going to Europe, called Galileo.
With those three systems, you have what is always necessary -- a level of redundancy that says, if one system fails, you'll still have a way to make sure that you're being controlled.
Because if you're in this world, where computers are controlling what you're doing, it's going to be very critical that something can't fail on you.
How would a trip in a Skycar work?
Well, you can't right now take off from your home because it's too noisy.
I mean to be able to take off from your home, you'd have to be extremely quiet.
But it's still fairly quiet.
You'd motor, electrically, to a vertiport, which may be a few blocks, maybe even a few miles away.
This is clearly, as I said earlier, a roadable aircraft, and you're not going to spend that much time on the road.
After all, if you can fly like that, why are you going to drive around on a highway?
Go to a local vertiport, plug in your destination, delivered almost like a passenger.
You can play computer games, you can sleep, you can read on the way.
This is the world -- there won't be you as a pilot.
And I know the pilots in the audience aren't going to like that -- and I've had a lot of bad feedback from people who want to be up there, flying around and experiencing that.
And of course, I suppose like recreational parks you can still do that.
But the vehicle itself is going to be a very, very controlled environment.
Or it's going to have no use to you as a person who might use such a system.
We flew the first vehicle for the international press in 1965, when I really got it started.
I was a professor at the U.C. Davis System, and I got a lot of excitement around this, and I was able to fund the initiation of the program back in that time.
And then through the various years we invented various vehicles.
Actually the critical point was in 1989, when we demonstrated the stability of this vehicle -- how completely stable it was in all circumstances, which is of course very critical.
Still not a practical vehicle during all of this, but moving in the right direction, we believe.
Finally, in the early part of -- or actually the middle of 2002, we flew the 400 -- M400, which was the four-passenger vehicle.
In this case here, we're flying it remotely, as we always did at the beginning.
And we had very small power plants in it at this time.
We are now installing larger powerplants, which will make it possible for me to get back on board.
A vertical-takeoff aircraft is not the safest vehicle during the test flight program.
There's an old adage that applied for the years between 1950s and 1970s, when every aeronautical company was working on vertical-takeoff aircraft.
A vertical-takeoff aircraft needs an artificial stabilization system -- that's essential.
At least for the hover, and the low-speed flight.
If that single-stability system, that brain that flies that aircraft, fails, or if the engine fails, that vehicle crashes.
There is no option to that.
And the adage that I'm referring to, that applied at that time, was that nothing comes down faster than a VTOL aircraft upside down.
(Laughter) That's a macabre comment because we lost a lot of pilots.
In fact, the aircraft companies gave up on vertical-takeoff aircraft more or less for a number of years.
And there's really only one operational aircraft in the world today that's a vertical-takeoff aircraft -- as distinct from a helicopter -- and that's the Hawker Harrier jump jet.
A vertical-takeoff aircraft, like the hummingbird, has a very high metabolism, which means it requires a lot of energy.
Getting that energy is very, very difficult.
It all comes down to that power plant -- how to get a large amount of power in a small package.
Fortunately, Dr. Felix Wankel invented the rotary engine.
A very unique engine -- it's round, it's small, it's vibration-free.
It fits exactly where we need to fit it, right in the center of the hubs of the ducts in the system -- very critical.
In fact that engine -- for those who are into the automobile -- know that it recently is applied to the RX8 -- the Mazda.
And that sportscar won Sports Car of the Year.
Wonderful engine.
In that application, it generates one horsepower per pound, which is twice as good as your car engine today, but only half of what we need.
My company has spent 35 years and many millions of dollars taking that rotary engine, which was invented in the late '50s, and getting it to the point that we get over two horsepower per pound, reliably, and critical.
We actually get 175 horsepower into one cubic foot.
We have eight engines in this vehicle.
We have four computers.
We have two parachutes.
Redundancy is the critical issue here.
If you want to stay alive you've got to have backups.
And we have actually flown this vehicle and lost an engine, and continued to hover.
The computers back up each other.
There's a voting system -- if one computer is not agreeing with the other three, it's kicked out of the system.
And then you have three -- you still have the triple redundancy.
If one of those fails, you still have a second chance.
If you stick around, then good luck.
There won't be a third chance.
The parachutes are there -- hopefully, more for psychological than real reasons, but they will be an ultimate backup if it comes to that.
(Laughter) I'd like to show you an animation in this next one, which is one element of the Skycar's use, but it's one that demonstrates how it could be used.
You could think of it personally in your own terms, of how you might use it.
Video: Skycar dispatched, launch rescue vehicle for San Francisco.
Paul Moller: I believe that personal transportation in something like the Skycar, probably in another volantor form as well, will be a significant part of our lives, as Dr. Goldin says, within the next 10 years.
And it's going to change the demographics in a very significant way.
If you can live 75 miles from San Francisco and get there in 15 minutes, you're going to sell your 700,000-dollar apartment, buy an upscale home on the side of a mountain, buy a Skycar, which I think would be priced at that time perhaps in the area of 100,000 dollars, put money in the bank ...
that's a very significant incentive for getting out of San Francisco.
But you better be the first one out of town as the real estate values go to hell.
(Laughter) Developing the Skycar has been a real challenge.
Obviously I'm dependent on a lot of other people believing in what I'm doing -- both financially and in technical help.
And that has -- you run into situations where you have this great acceptance of what you're doing, and a lot of rejection of the same kind of thing.
I characterized this emerging technology in an aphorism, as it's described, which really talks about what I've experienced, and I'm sure what other people may have experienced in emerging technologies.
There's an interesting poll that came out recently under NAS -- I think it's MSNBC -- in which they asked the question, "Are you in the market for a volantor?"
Twenty-three percent said, "Yes, as soon as possible."
Forty-seven percent -- yes, as soon as they could -- price could come down.
Twenty-three percent said, "As soon as it's proven safe."
Only seven percent said that they wouldn't consider buying a Skycar.
I'm encouraged by that.
At least it makes me feel like, to some extent, it is becoming self-evident.
That we need an alternative to the automobile, at least for those 50-mile trips and more, so that the highways become usable in today's world.
Thank you.
This is what my last week looked like.
What I did, who I was with, the main sensations I had for every waking hour ...
If the feeling came as I thought of my dad who recently passed away, or if I could have just definitely avoided the worries and anxieties.
And if you think I'm a little obsessive, you're probably right.
But clearly, from this visualization, you can learn much more about me than from this other one, which are images you're probably more familiar with and which you possibly even have on your phone right now.
Bar charts for the steps you walked, pie charts for the quality of your sleep -- the path of your morning runs.
In my day job, I work with data.
I run a data visualization design company, and we design and develop ways to make information accessible through visual representations.
What my job has taught me over the years is that to really understand data and their true potential, sometimes we actually have to forget about them and see through them instead.
Because data are always just a tool we use to represent reality.
They're always used as a placeholder for something else, but they are never the real thing.
But let me step back for a moment to when I first understood this personally.
In 1994, I was 13 years old.
I was a teenager in Italy.
I was too young to be interested in politics, but I knew that a businessman, Silvio Berlusconi, was running for president for the moderate right.
We lived in a very liberal town, and my father was a politician for the Democratic Party.
And I remember that no one thought that Berlusconi could get elected -- that was totally not an option.
But it happened.
And I remember the feeling very vividly.
It was a complete surprise, as my dad promised that in my town he knew nobody who voted for him.
This was the first time when the data I had gave me a completely distorted image of reality.
My data sample was actually pretty limited and skewed, so probably it was because of that, I thought, I lived in a bubble, and I didn't have enough chances to see outside of it.
Now, fast-forward to November 8, 2016 in the United States.
The internet polls, statistical models, all the pundits agreeing on a possible outcome for the presidential election.
It looked like we had enough information this time, and many more chances to see outside the closed circle we lived in -- but we clearly didn't.
The feeling felt very familiar.
I had been there before.
I think it's fair to say the data failed us this time -- and pretty spectacularly.
We believed in data, but what happened, even with the most respected newspaper, is that the obsession to reduce everything to two simple percentage numbers to make a powerful headline made us focus on these two digits and them alone.
In an effort to simplify the message and draw a beautiful, inevitable red and blue map, we lost the point completely.
We somehow forgot that there were stories -- stories of human beings behind these numbers.
In a different context, but to a very similar point, a peculiar challenge was presented to my team by this woman.
She came to us with a lot of data, but ultimately she wanted to tell one of the most humane stories possible.
She's Samantha Cristoforetti.
She has been the first Italian woman astronaut, and she contacted us before being launched on a six-month-long expedition to the International Space Station.
She told us, "I'm going to space, and I want to do something meaningful with the data of my mission to reach out to people."
A mission to the International Space Station comes with terabytes of data about anything you can possibly imagine -- the orbits around Earth, the speed and position of the ISS and all of the other thousands of live streams from its sensors.
We had all of the hard data we could think of -- just like the pundits before the election -- but what is the point of all these numbers?
People are not interested in data for the sake of it, because numbers are never the point.
They're always the means to an end.
The story we needed to tell is that there is a human being in a teeny box flying in space above your head, and that you can actually see her with your naked eye on a clear night.
So we decided to use data to create a connection between Samantha and all of the people looking at her from below.
We designed and developed what we called "Friends in Space," a web application that simply lets you say "hello" to Samantha from where you are, and "hello" to all the people who are online at the same time from all over the world.
And all of these "hellos" left visible marks on the map as Samantha was flying by and as she was actually waving back every day at us using Twitter from the ISS.
This made people see the mission's data from a very different perspective.
It all suddenly became much more about our human nature and our curiosity, rather than technology.
So data powered the experience, but stories of human beings were the drive.
The very positive response of its thousands of users taught me a very important lesson -- that working with data means designing ways to transform the abstract and the uncountable into something that can be seen, felt and directly reconnected to our lives and to our behaviors, something that is hard to achieve if we let the obsession for the numbers and the technology around them lead us in the process.
But we can do even more to connect data to the stories they represent.
We can remove technology completely.
A few years ago, I met this other woman, Stefanie Posavec -- a London-based designer who shares with me the passion and obsession about data.
We didn't know each other, but we decided to run a very radical experiment, starting a communication using only data, no other language, and we opted for using no technology whatsoever to share our data.
In fact, our only means of communication would be through the old-fashioned post office.
For "Dear Data," every week for one year, we used our personal data to get to know each other -- personal data around weekly shared mundane topics, from our feelings to the interactions with our partners, from the compliments we received to the sounds of our surroundings.
Personal information that we would then manually hand draw on a postcard-size sheet of paper that we would every week send from London to New York, where I live, and from New York to London, where she lives.
The front of the postcard is the data drawing, and the back of the card contains the address of the other person, of course, and the legend for how to interpret our drawing.
The very first week into the project, we actually chose a pretty cold and impersonal topic.
How many times do we check the time in a week?
So here is the front of my card, and you can see that every little symbol represents all of the times that I checked the time, positioned for days and different hours chronologically -- nothing really complicated here.
But then you see in the legend how I added anecdotal details about these moments.
In fact, the different types of symbols indicate why I was checking the time -- what was I doing?
Was I bored?
Was I hungry?
Was I late?
Did I check it on purpose or just casually glance at the clock?
And this is the key part -- representing the details of my days and my personality through my data collection.
Using data as a lens or a filter to discover and reveal, for example, my never-ending anxiety for being late, even though I'm absolutely always on time.
Stefanie and I spent one year collecting our data manually to force us to focus on the nuances that computers cannot gather -- or at least not yet -- using data also to explore our minds and the words we use, and not only our activities.
Like at week number three, where we tracked the "thank yous" we said and were received, and when I realized that I thank mostly people that I don't know.
Apparently I'm a compulsive thanker to waitresses and waiters, but I definitely don't thank enough the people who are close to me.
Over one year, the process of actively noticing and counting these types of actions became a ritual.
It actually changed ourselves.
We became much more in tune with ourselves, much more aware of our behaviors and our surroundings.
Over one year, Stefanie and I connected at a very deep level through our shared data diary, but we could do this only because we put ourselves in these numbers, adding the contexts of our very personal stories to them.
It was the only way to make them truly meaningful and representative of ourselves.
I am not asking you to start drawing your personal data, or to find a pen pal across the ocean.
But I'm asking you to consider data -- all kind of data -- as the beginning of the conversation and not the end.
Because data alone will never give us a solution.
And this is why data failed us so badly -- because we failed to include the right amount of context to represent reality -- a nuanced, complicated and intricate reality.
We kept looking at these two numbers, obsessing with them and pretending that our world could be reduced to a couple digits and a horse race, while the real stories, the ones that really mattered, were somewhere else.
What we missed looking at these stories only through models and algorithms is what I call "data humanism."
In the Renaissance humanism, European intellectuals placed the human nature instead of God at the center of their view of the world.
I believe something similar needs to happen with the universe of data.
Now data are apparently treated like a God -- keeper of infallible truth for our present and our future.
The experiences that I shared with you today taught me that to make data faithfully representative of our human nature and to make sure they will not mislead us anymore, we need to start designing ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities in how we collect, process, analyze and display them.
I do see a place where, ultimately, instead of using data only to become more efficient, we will all use data to become more humane.
Thank you.
(Applause)