Where Is My Automated Painter?

The cry of my generation, for years now, has been: “Dude, where’s my flying car?”

My friend Jeff Greason is fond of explaining that as an engineering problem, a flying car is no issue at all. It is as a legal problem that flying cars get interesting, because of course the FAA won’t let such a thing exist without clutching it madly and distorting it with its hands made of bureaucracy and crazy. (Okay, he doesn’t put it that way, but I do.)

So instead we have mostly self-driving cars. (I...