Doomscroller vs. Windtunneler

How to expose the fallacies of "it'll never happen" arguments

About twenty years ago, the Canadian army hired me to write them a short science fiction novel, and I made a discovery I think you might find useful.

We’re constantly bombarded with negative messaging, and much of it (particularly in the climate and economics spaces) takes the form of “X will never happen because the existing system can’t do it.” For instance, I recently watched a YouTuber confidently predict that eVTOL aircraft will never take off (pardon the pun) because they are like helicopters in many ways, and there are big issues with helicopters that mean they can never scale for mass transportation. You’ll have seen similar arguments about electric cars (“we’ll never be able to scale up battery production”) and renewable energy (“the grid just isn’t built to handle intermittent energy sources” and “the sun doesn’t shine 24/7 and the wind is unpredictable"). I’ll show you three ways to detect and diagnose such arguments and show how I’ve learned to counter them in a defensible way.

We’ll get back to my army experience in a second, but first, let’s take the eVTOL argument as an example. I won’t link to the video because I’m not interested in attacking the individual who made the argument; but I’m happy to attack the argument itself, which was that

• Helicopters produce massive, dangerous downwash that can throw debris around, which is dangerous. You’ll never have flying cars in every driveway because eVTOLs will produce similarly dangerous blasts of air.

• There is already a shortage of pilots. How are we going to train enough to fly these things? Also, helicopters are limited to flying only a few hours a day because of the danger of pilot fatigue. So eVTOLs will spend most of their time idle. eVTOLs can never be economical because pilots are expensive and rare, and the machines will not be in the air often enough to bring fares down to a reasonable level.

• Having thousands of flying cars crisscrossing the city will be a traffic nightmare. Collisions are inevitable.

• Helicopters spend more time in service than they do flying. Aircraft are built to an entirely different safety standard than cars, and this labour-and-time-intensive service cycle alone is enough to guarantee that the costs of running these machines will be astronomical.

These are highly convincing arguments. There are more, the main one being that batteries are so heavy that they limit the range of eVTOLs to very short flights. Long charging times mean not enough flights could be made during the day to create a decent revenue stream at affordable prices, even if the things weren’t grounded for pilot fatigue or maintenance most of the time. Once again, I’ll emphasize that these are all really good arguments against eVTOLs becoming successful. One or more might even turn out to be right. However, they’re presented as if they’re decisive without needing further consideration, and this is definitely not true.

There are three main problems with the way this YouTuber presents them:

1. False equivalence. They directly map the characteristics of helicopters onto eVTOLs, ignoring that eVTOLs might be an entirely different technology with a different use.

2. Presentism. This is the fallacy of assuming that current circumstances, perspectives, or norms are universally applicable or will continue indefinitely. The red flag for presentism is when someone argues that something new can’t be done because of how things are. So, when somebody tells you that “the grid can’t handle intermittent energy from renewables,” your reply should be, “so you’re saying that no grid will ever be able to handle renewables?” Just because the electrical grid, as it is engineered today, has trouble with renewables, does not mean that we can’t redesign it. Heck, that redesigned grid might even be cheaper! How can we know without looking at the possibilities? Which brings us to the third issue:

3. Refusal to synthesize. This is the subtle one, and where the Canadian army comes back into the picture. In 2005 they hired me to write Crisis in Zefra, a design fiction that incorporates citations for all the ideas used in the story, discussion sections as interchapters, and questions for the reader. Zefra is the story of a Canadian peacekeeping force encountering asymmetric warfare while trying to help stabilize a fictional city called Zefra. It’s intended as a training tool for future officers and has been very popular in the Canadian, American, Australian, and UK armed forces. I followed it up in 2014 with Crisis in Urlia.
   For this project, I was handed a massive file of innovations and technologies that the client wanted included. Basically a laundry list of technologies, from AI to Augmented Reality and massive battlefield simulations. Each one came with an independent analysis of its potential use or impact.
   But something magical happens when you take a laundry list like that, and synthesize all its parts into a narrative. I discovered that the only way this future world made sense was when I took into account how each innovation or technology affected all the others. So the fact that everyone in Zefra has mobile phones means that the enemy can coordinate flash mobs to stall the movement of peacekeepers through the contested space. (This was 2005, pre-iPhone.) At one point the bad guys use a game engine to create a photorealistic deepfake video of Canadian troops firing on unarmed civilians (today’s Unreal Engine 5 could do that). Despite how thoroughly each of the innovations had been analyzed in isolation, none of their impacts could be properly assessed except by playing them against one another. Taken together, they implied all kinds of synergistic possibilities (such as the flash mobs and deepfake propaganda).

The subtle fallacy of the “it’ll never happen” argument lies in its refusal to imagine how the different innovations that go into something truly new, such as eVTOLs, might reinforce each others’ advantages and create new use cases. The person making the “it’ll never happen” argument is treating each part of the system in isolation and in a presentist way. The answer to that is to put all the pieces in motion together in a future that you recognize will not be like the present. I use storytelling techniques to do this; many futurists use a more restricted approach that they call ‘windtunneling.’

Large institutions use windtunneling to compare the impact of policy choices under different circumstances. Usually, you develop a set of scenarios—different possible futures—and then perform an imaginative exercise to evaluate the impact of a proposed policy if each of those scenarios comes to pass. If you want a good summary of the approach at the government level, check out New Zealand’s primer.

I’m not suggesting you follow such a formal methodology, just saying that there is one; what we can personally do for any “it’ll never happen” is just apply our imaginations in a similar but much more modest way.

Let’s take the case against eVTOLs. For example, the argument that you’ll never have a flying car because eVTOLs create a downwash problem like helicopters ignores several simple solutions, such as meticulously swept neighbourhood parking lots specifically for eVTOLs. These could have ten-foot walls around them for noise and extra security against flying debris. Any parking lot not surrounded by trees could be used because these aircraft are relatively small and very quiet. This means you’re not parking your eVTOL in your driveway, but instead walking a block or two to get to it. Big deal; having to do that does not make them impossible. It makes them different.

Are you likely to be able to afford one? No; but they make perfect sense as part of a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) system. You book a ride on your way out the door, using an app on your phone. By the time you get to the parking lot, an eVTOL has landed and is waiting.

What about the shortage of pilots, and the requirement that these craft be grounded most of the time because of pilot fatigue? And that the airways above the city will be congested with dangerous cross-path travelers? These objections makes sense—if eVTOLs are just another kind of helicopter. The solution is simple: don’t use pilots. Drones are already perfectly capable of flying intricate flight paths without danger of collision. Frankly, at this point I’d trust an AI to fly me around the city more than I’d trust a human. Removing the pilot removes all the costs associated with them (without replacing their function in other areas of aviation), and removes the regulatory requirements that might otherwise ground these aircraft to prevent pilot fatigue. You can still be in control because current LLM AI is perfectly capable of holding a conversation with you as you fly. Like this:

“Hey, why don’t you put me down in that baseball diamond instead? It’s closer to where I want to go.”

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

(…Which is not at all alarming. Ahem.) (Windtunneling can surface unexpected downsides too, and maybe AI pilots would be one of them; I personally doubt it.)

Take batteries: if you recognize that the argument from battery limitations is a presentist argument, you can counter with, “So you’re saying that the fact that battery costs have fallen by 90% over the past decade even while power densities have increased by a factor of 8 means that batteries will never, ever, improve to the point that long-distance travel with eVTOLs becomes practical?” Recharge time is not an issue if you use battery-swapping. And, if you’re then willing to combine MaaS, local landing lots, better batteries and pilotless craft, it becomes clear that cheap intercity flights could be quite practical using eVTOLs by the 2030s.

The argument from maintenance time is similar. Aircraft are certainly built to different standards, and currently, eVTOLs are hand-built. Does this fact, in and of itself, mean they can never be mass-produced? Or is that a presentist assumption: “that’s not what we do now, so we can never do it.”

Being entirely electric, eVTOLs have the potential to be built with far fewer moving parts than traditional aircraft—potentially, only a literal handful consisting of the motors and control systems. The number of parts that require maintenance could be far smaller than it is for highly complicated mechanical systems such as helicopters. If a MaaS eVTOL drops by a robotized testing center once every couple of days, that might be sufficient. Electric motors generally require no maintenance at all, and much of what would have formerly been mechanical will be replaced by software.

So you’re windtunneling when you assess potential synergies between the elements of the proposed innovation and its future environment. Putting the above synergies into motion in a story, I would find myself getting dragged toward the idea of using eVTOLs for freight. After all, they can be built at scales ranging from palm-sized to big enough to carry a shipping container. Not that I want those flying directly over my house, but that anxiety sparks further ideas about them using existing rail corridors etc. The prospect is that truck transport starts to wither, reducing the need for roads and driveways that connect to every building. The city as a single concrete and asphalt surface dotted with buildings and occasional green space, gets inverted into the idea of roads as limited, local, and low-speed, a discontinuous set of surfaces instead of the ideal advocated by the old Usenet group alt.pave.the.earth. Easy Rider and American car culture are suddenly in the rear-view mirror, increasingly merging with other cultural tropes that my daughter’s generation associates with ‘the 1900s.’ For a storyteller, that’s really interesting because it highlights how the idea of the personal automobile got inextricably tangled with the idea of personal freedom in the U.S. and drove an industrial expansion that has ended up threatening a mass extinction. But what if we could have freedom of mobility, without tangling that idea up with the requirement that we each own our own car?

From there, the dominoes start falling. Car culture always relied on giant, state-funded megaprojects: a highly subsidized and expensive highway, road, and parking infrastructure. Which required a feedback loop of concrete and asphalt production, fossil fuel use, mining, and manufacturing of millions of cars, that continues today. Even if eVTOLs are more expensive by themselves, how much money could we collectively save by reducing the scale of the car-and-road-based industrial culture we have now? And without sacrificing mobility or freedom?

At this point, you should be wondering if I’m going too far—and you should. It’s easy to let your imagination run away with you, leading you to an equally unjustified “it has to happen!” argument. We don’t want to do that; in this case, eVTOLs may still fail for all kinds of reasons, including the ones that we’ve critiqued here. We’re not looking to win an argument with this process, but to counter a fallacious argument that is designed to shut down our critical faculties.

That might sound abstract, so I’ll just put it this way:

Self-styled experts may deploy the fallacies of false equivalence, presentism, and refusal to synthesize, in order to convince you that an innovation is impossible. You can watch for these tactics and counter them by pointing out false equivalencies, questioning assumptions about what can never change, and windtunneling ideas to synthesize a more complete view of the future.

—K